This report is very compelling. If ACEs is the largest chronic public health disaster in the U.S., as Robert Anda says, and is the single most important health problem facing Americans, as Bessel van der Kolk says, then perhaps adverse childhood experiences are why American women aren't living as long as they should.
But new research shows that while life span has been on a positive overall trajectory for mankind, it's been on a not-so-positive trajectory for the U.S. in particular: Americans' life expectancies might be increasing, but those of other nations are increasing much faster, particularly among women. From 1980 to 2007, for example, the life spans of 50-year-old women in the U.S. had increased by about 2.5 years. But in Japan and Italy, it had increased by 6.4 years and 5.2 years, respectively.
And now, researchers are scrambling to understand why it is that American women are dying sooner than than those in other first-world countries.
Using data from the Human Mortality Database, a research project by the University of California at Berkeley and the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany that calculates death rates, a panel of experts convened by the National Research Council examined the changes in life expectancy across a variety of countries. They published their research in a report published by the National Academies Press in 2011 (and flagged by the study's director, Laudan Aron at the Urban Institute this week.)
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