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  • The American Scholar

    PROGRESS REPORT

    Mar 02, 2020 4 minutes
    REBECCA McCARTHY

    Trending Down

    For the past three years, the life expectancy of Americans has been decreasing, and Steven Woolf, a professor of population health at Virginia Commonwealth University, is trying to figure out why. He’s skeptical of the hypothesis that attributes this decrease solely to “deaths of despair”—such as those caused by suicide, opioid addiction, or alcoholism—because deaths related to hypertension, diabetes, and obesity have also increased during this period. “What is it about American life that’s causing this pattern?” he asks. “There are lots of unanswered questions.”

    After examining 60 years of data from each of the 50 states, Woolf has concluded that a decline in our

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