People live longer in Bergen County, N.J. — an average of about 80 years — than in any other county in the northeastern United States, according to a Harvard study released yesterday that compares life expectancy in counties across the country.
And Asian-American women in Bergen County have the longest average lifespan, 91 years, of any racial group in the nation, said the authors — from the Harvard School of Public Health — of the study, which appears in the new issue of the journal PLoS Medicine.
Regional disparities in longevity have grown over the last two decades, the researchers found, as the places with the longest-lived populations made the greatest gains. A few places, in Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta, lost ground.
“I think the people at the top are increasingly benefiting from improving technology more than the people at the bottom,” said Dr. Christopher J. L. Murray, the chief author. Much of the difference among counties, he said, appears to stem from differences in things like tobacco and alcohol use, obesity, high blood pressure and cholesterol levels.
“Surprisingly, the regional differences have less to do with the elderly than with chronic disease and premature death in young and middle-aged adults,” he said. “Once you get to 65, there isn’t as big a difference across these groups.”
The study found several places where affluent, mostly white suburban counties with relatively long average life spans sit side-by-side with counties that are poorer, more urban and less white.
In New York State in 1999, the most recent year in the study, Westchester was the longest-lived county, at an average of 79.5 years, while next door, the Bronx had the shortest average lifespan, 75.0 years.
Across the entire New York region, the lowest average life expectancy was 74.7 years in Essex County, which includes Newark, while adjacent Bergen County had an average of 79.9 years, higher than any county north of Maryland and east of the Mississippi River.
But there were dozens of places in the nation that fared better, including affluent suburban counties in California, Virginia and Maryland and several counties in Hawaii. Montgomery County, Md., near Washington, was one of 10 counties tied with the highest figure, 81.3 years.
Yet the largest number of counties with long life expectancies were rural areas with below-average incomes in the mountain states of the West and the northern plains states — particularly Colorado, Minnesota and Iowa.
Several counties in South Dakota with mostly Native American populations had the lowest average, 66.6 years. The next-lowest average was in Baltimore, at 68.6 years.
“Those regional differences are akin to what we see between the highly developed, high-income countries and some developing countries,” Dr. Murray said.
Many other national studies have shown disparities among races, with Asian-Americans living longest, followed by whites and Hispanics, and blacks having the shortest life spans.
But the Harvard researchers highlighted the figure for Asian-American women in Bergen County, an average life expectancy of 91.1 years — a number that Dr. Murray called extraordinary, even in light of the longer life spans of Asian-Americans and women. It was the highest average the researchers found anywhere in the country for any racial subgroup in a county with a large enough number of deaths to be considered statistically significant.
The figures in the study come from two federal agencies, the Census Bureau and the National Center for Health Statistics, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They cover the years 1980 to 1999, with each year’s numbers actually representing a 5-year “rolling average” (for example, the 1999 statistics represent data collected from 1997 through 2001).
Dr. Murray said that the center for health statistics had stopped including counties in its death records in 2001.
