Macomb County Residents Living Longer: Research

MACOMB COUNTY, MI — Macomb County residents are living longer. As of 2014, the average county resident was living 78.44 years — about a half-year longer than in 2004, according to recently released research.

That bad news? Macomb County residents live shorter lives than people in Oakland County, where folks live an average of 79.98 years. Residents do have significantly longer lives than Wayne County residents, where the average lifespan is just 75.33 years.

The research comes from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. Nationally, the difference in lifespans is more acute between wealthy and poorer counties, researchers discovered. That gap is as large as 20.1 years, MPR News reported.

"With every passing year, inequality — however you measure it — has been widening over the last 34 years," Christopher Murray, who headed research for the university, told the news outlet. "And so next year we can reliably expect it'll be even more than 20. That is probably the most alarming part of the analysis.”

Health experts have long known that Americans living in different parts of the country tend to have different lifespans, MPR reported. But Murray's team decided to take a closer look, analyzing records from every U.S. county between 1980 and 2014.

In counties with the longest lifespans, people tended to live about 87 years. People lived to about age 67 in America’s poorest counties. People that live the longest tend to have higher incomes and are more highly educated, MPR reported.

Marin County, Calif., and Summit County, Colo. are among the U.S. communities with the longest lifespans. The lowest life expectancies are along the lower Mississippi River Valley as well as parts of West Virginia and Kentucky, according to the analysis.

Michigan seems to be a microcosm of the research.

In Oakland County, the life expectancy of women was 81.97 years in 2014. Wayne County women lived 78.07 years. It was even more pronounced among men, where Oakland County residents averaged 77.83 years in 2014 while Wayne County residents were at 72.47.

Macomb County fell in between Oakland and Wayne. Men lived 76.12 years and women 80.63.

In Michigan, the averages were 80.47 for women and 76 years for men in 2014. The U.S. averages were 81.45 for women and 76.71 for men.

An interactive map of lifespan changes over time can be found here.

Photo by Hamza Butt via Flickr Commons