New Delhi: A new study has found that death rates among young adults in the US continue to be higher than expected in the post-COVID-19 world, with scientists calling for more research into ongoing consequences of the pandemic.
The study, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Network Open, analysed over 33 lakh deaths from 1999 to 2023 among early adults in the US (aged 25-44 years).
Researchers, including those from the University of Minnesota, found that death rates rose sharply during the pandemic and remain higher than expected post-pandemic.
The heightened death rates seen during the COVID-19 pandemic intensified an already declining trend in the young adults that began around 2010, the team said.
As a result, the age group saw 70 per cent higher death rates in 2023, compared to what might have been if death rates had not begun to rise about a decade before the pandemic, the team said.
“What we didn’t expect is how many different causes of death have really grown for these early adults. It’s drug and alcohol deaths, but it’s also car collisions, it’s circulatory and metabolic diseases — causes that are very different from each other. That tells us this isn’t one simple problem to fix, but something broader,” said lead author Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, an associate professor in the University of Minnesota.
The study found that overall, there was a large jump in the death rates during “the core pandemic years” of 2019-2021, which remained nearly 20 per cent higher in 2023 than in 2019.
“Although mortality rates decreased after the core pandemic years, excess mortality remained higher than expected based on pre-pandemic levels,” the authors wrote.
“Increases in early adult mortality can signal population risks that may become more pronounced as these cohorts age,” they wrote.
Drug-related deaths were found to be the single largest cause of excess mortality in 2023, compared with the mortality expected had earlier trends continued.
Other important causes contributing to the excess deaths were varied — natural causes, including cardiometabolic and nutrition-related, and a range of external ones, such as those related to transport.
“Our findings underscore the urgent need for comprehensive policies to address the structural factors driving worsening health among recent generations of young adults,” said co-author Andrew Stokes, an associate professor of global health at Boston University School of Public Health.
“Solutions may include expanding access to nutritious foods, strengthening social services and increasing regulation of industries that affect public health,” Stokes said.
The results suggested “the need to attend to ongoing consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic — which may be expressed in causes of death related to long-term consequences of infection, medical disruption, and social dislocation — and to deleterious health trends that predated it.”
PTI
