Cost of living crisis threatens to reverse gains in life expectancy, study finds

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The cost of living crisis is set to cut lives short and significantly widen the wealth and health gap between the richest and poorest sectors of society in Scotland—and elsewhere in the UK—suggests a modeling study published in the open access journal BMJ Public Health.

The proportion of people dying before their time is set to rise by nearly 6.5%---30 extra deaths/100,000 of the population annually—with those in the most deprived households experiencing a rate 4 times that of the least deprived.

They used scenario modeling—a mathematical technique that envisages a range of potential futures, rather than just one----to estimate how: recent high inflation would affect household incomes; mitigation measures would modify these effects; death rates/life expectancy and inequalities in these would change as a result.

Similarly, the researchers estimated large increases in deaths resulting from the real term reduction in incomes for each of the scenarios modeled. Overall life expectancy would also fall in each of the three scenarios modeled: by just over 2% ; by 1.4% ; and by 0.9% . But in each case, larger reductions in life expectancy were predicted in the most deprived areas, ranging from from 2.7 years in the unmitigated scenario to 1 year in the scenario including both the EPG and Cost of Living Support payments.

 

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