Death disparities among Black Americans revealed a worrying truth

Black Americans suffered from an excess of deaths since the 1990s that erased the morality gains they had made according to a 2023 study that revealed a new layer of disparity in the country.

Published in the journal JAMA Network Open, the study's authors discovered that the US Black population suffered 1.63 million excess deaths and 80 million years of lost life over the previous two decades.

The excess loss of life reversed years of progress Black Americans had made in terms of mortality risk when compared to the US White population, which was a concerning finding.

Researchers from Yale’s New Haven Hospital were on a mission to reveal disparities in mortality rates of Black Americans and came to some rather shocking final conclusions. 

Using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the researchers found that the Black population suffered 1.63 million excess deaths between 1990 and 2020. 

The loss of life represented more than 80 million years of potential life not lived compared with the country’s white population. However, the result of the study revealed an even bigger problem. 

After adjusting for age the death rate of Black Americans showed that it had fallen until 2011 and then stalled until 2019 when the gap between deaths began to widen in 2020. 

"After a period of progress in reducing disparities, improvements stalled, and differences between the Black population and the white population worsened in 2020," the study’s authors wrote. 

The researchers noted in their study that Covid-19 played a role in the widening gap in 2020 but also said there were other factors killing Black Americans faster than White populations. 

Heart disease was the leading cause of excess deaths among Black Americans throughout the two-decade period and that condition was followed by cancer, which was also an important source of death disparities. 

Critically, the study’s authors noted that both heart disease and cancer were conditions that had “modifiable risk factors” and were affected by “social determinants of health," meaning they could be changed. 

The authors added that it would be necessary to re-engage with diseases driving excess mortalities so that advancements could be made uniformly across the U.S. population. 

One of the most startling findings of the study was that disparities in lost lives were most prominent among Black infants, which was a factor the researchers were not expecting. 

Because the disparities in loss of life were so great at such an early age, the numbers greatly factored into the overall loss of potential life of the American Black population. 

“This excess mortality occurred in a period of life of highest vulnerability and warrants new dedicated public health initiatives targeting early childhood health,” the study’s authors wrote in the discussion section of their research paper. 

Dr. Harlan Krumholz was the lead author of the study and spoke with CNN about his research and why it was important to understand the trends in U.S. death disparities. 

“Over the last twenty years, the first part of those two decades we were making progress,” Dr. Krumholz. “Soon after the economic disruption with the financial crash, the whole improvement stalled, and then with the pandemic we did so much worse.”

“There is no biological reason why Black people should have a higher mortality rate than White people," Dr. Krumholz continued.

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

"It is a function of our social construct of our society, the legacy, and the history and the persistence till today of structural racism in society,” the study's lead author added.

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

Krumholz and his co-authors said in their work that their study should serve as a call to action for our policymakers and said annual public reporting on trace-based death disparities would be an important step in national accountability.