BOSTON – A report last week from the Mass. Department of Public Health shows that life expectancy in the Bay State is as high as ever: 80 years. But health disparities persist and opioid overdose deaths are on the rise, as are fall-related deaths in the elderly.
The report, titled Massachusetts Deaths 2006, notes that the life expectancy for an infant born in the state in 2006 was actually two years higher than for the nation as a whole.
The report also shows cancer is now the No. 1 killer in Massachusetts, overtaking heart disease. Death rates from both continue to decline, but cancer deaths have not declined as fast as heart disease deaths. Health officials attributed the improvements in heart-disease deaths to better medical therapies and behavioral interventions to control for risk factors such as high cholesterol and blood pressure.
Lung cancer ranked first in the number of cancer deaths for both men and women (28 percent of all cancer deaths followed by 9 percent for colorectal cancer deaths).
Death rates for stroke and diabetes continue to drop, the report says; the stroke death rate has decreased 27 percent since 2000, and the diabetes death rate has decreased 22 percent.
Black and Hispanic residents continue to have higher death rates from these diseases, however, sometimes substantially higher. The breast cancer rate for black non-Hispanic women, for example, is 35.3 deaths per 100,000, vs. 23.3 deaths per 100,000 for white non-Hispanic women.
The overall death rate for those with a high school education or less was almost three times higher than the death rate for those with 13 years of education or more.
Gov. Deval Patrick’s administration has made addressing health disparities a priority, and DPH Commissioner John Auerbach said the state needs to remain “focused on that gap.”
“We cannot be satisfied by the improvements that we see in this report, until those improvements are shared equally – to the greatest extent possible – by all of the residents of Massachusetts,” he said.
The report also shows deaths caused by overdoses of heroin and other opioids, such as Oxycontin, rose by more than 7 percent per year from 2000 to 2006. Two-thirds of all poisonings reported to DPH during 2006 were the result of opioid overdoses. A total of 637 people died from opioid poisoning in 2006, up from 544 the year before.
Elderly deaths due to falls rose by 65 percent from 2005 to 2006, to 341. Health officials said they were not certain what contributed to the spike, but theorized that an aging population, along with better diagnosis and reporting of fall-related deaths, might be factors.
“We need to better understand the findings in this report related to fall deaths,” Auerbach said. “In the coming year we will work with our partners in government, non-profit and community groups, and within our Falls Prevention Coalition to see what we can do collectively to bring these numbers down.”
The homicide rate remained stable from 2005, after increasing about 6 percent per year since 1998. In 2006, there were 183 homicides in Massachusetts. The suicide rate, which had been declining by about 2 percent per year since 1994, also held steady.
The infant mortality rate remained stable at 4.8 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2006, compared with 5 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2005.
The full report – Massachusetts Deaths 2006 – is posted at www.mass.gov/dph/pubstats.htm.
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