Americans are dying in young adulthood in ‘devastating’ numbers, according to a new report.
Excess deaths — fatalities above the number normally expected — among people between ages 25 and 44 have nearly tripled since 1999.
And while the Covid and the opioid epidemic have been partly to blame, researchers have found young adults are dying early from other, less obvious causes.
For example, homicides, alcohol-related deaths and car crash fatalities are all running much higher levels.
Deaths from ‘natural causes’ like chronic diseases also made up as many as one in six fatalities in Americans 25-45.
Overall in 2023, the young adult excess death rate was 70 percent higher than baseline.
This means a total of 172,785 people between the ages of 25 and 44 died that year and more than 71,000 of them shouldn’t have based on expert estimates.
Dr Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, lead study author and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, said: ‘What we didn’t expect is how many different causes of death have really grown for these early adults.
The above graph shows the spike in mortality rates in Americans under 44 starting in 2019. Deaths have largely been driven by opioid overdoses
‘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.’
The increase in overdose deaths may be due to a surge in fentanyl, which has killed 320,000 Americans in the last 10 years.
Federal data shows about 3,100 Americans died from fentanyl overdoses in 2014. Just five years later, in 2019, it claimed the lives of 36,000 people.
The latest CDC data shows deaths peaked in June 2023 at 77,693.
Deaths from natural causes may be due to recent increases in chronic diseases like heart disease.
Last month, the American Heart Association warned nearly 1million deaths in 2022 were caused by heart disease, more than cancer and dementia combined. This made it America’s leading cause of death.
A surge in car-related deaths, meanwhile, has been blamed on increased stress among drivers and drivers becoming increasingly distracted by their phones.
One recent study found car crash fatalities rose 16 percent from 2020 to 2021 alone.
The researchers from University of Minnesota and Boston University analyzed 3.3m deaths in Americans ages 25 to 44 from 1999 to 2023 included in the CDC’s Wonder database.
After staying stable for more than a decade, the number of excess deaths among Americans aged 25-45 began climbing in 2011.
By 2019, the rate was up a third compared to 2011.
The Covid pandemic caused excess deaths among this age group to peak in 2021, when three times as many people over the expected number died.
While deaths finally began to decrease in 2023, they remained about 70 percent higher than researchers anticipated based on the average before Covid.
The above graph shows increases in deaths by cause from 2011 through 2023
Jacob Wade, 26, a former Marine, had been a devoted family man to his wife, Britain Tomlin, and children, Walker and Blakely, when he accidentally overdosed on a drug cocktail laced with fentanyl in 2023
Evan White (pictured here) was diagnosed with colon cancer at 24. He died four years later, just weeks before his wedding
The researchers found in 2023, overdoses of opioids like fentanyl were responsible for the most excess deaths, accounting for one in three, or 48,884.
Natural causes – fatalities from chronic diseases like heart disease or diabetes – accounted for 16 percent of early deaths (16,265), while transport-related deaths made up 14 percent (15,551).
Alcohol and homicide each caused about eight percent of early deaths (9,763 and 10,257, respectively).
Other common causes included cancer, suicide, digestive and respiratory issues.
The findings, published in JAMA Network Open, are preliminary, and the full results have not yet been published.
