Atlanta – In what appears to be an amazing success for American medicine, preliminary government figures released Wednesday showed that the annual number of deaths in the U.S. dropped by nearly 50,000 in 2004 – the biggest decline in more than 60 years.
The 2 percent decrease, reported by the National Center for Health Statistics, came as a shock to many, because the U.S. is aging, growing in population and getting fatter. In fact, some experts said they suspect the numbers may not hold up when a final report is released later this year.
Nevertheless, center officials said the statistics, based on a review of about 90 percent of death records reported in all 50 states in 2004, were consistent across the country and were deemed solid enough to report.
The center said drops in the death rates for heart disease, cancer and stroke accounted for most of the decline.
The government also said that U.S. life expectancy has inched up again to 77.9 years, a record high but still behind that of about two dozen other countries.
The preliminary number of U.S. deaths recorded for 2004 was 2,398,343. That represents a decline of 49,945 from the 2,448,288 recorded in 2003.
U.S. deaths ordinarily rise slightly each year. The last decline in annual deaths occurred in 1997, a modest drop of 445 deaths from 1996.
The number of deaths has not dropped this steeply since 1938, when there were about 69,000 fewer than in 1937. A drop in 1944 came close – about 48,000 fewer deaths than the previous year.
Health officials could not immediately say why the number of deaths fell so sharply in either of those years.
“We will not make much of this until the final data come out,” said Elizabeth Ward, director of surveillance research for the American Cancer Society.
Overall, age-adjusted death rates fell to a record low of 801 deaths per 100,000 population in 2004, down from almost 833 deaths per 100,000 in 2003.
Heart disease continues to be the leading cause of death, accounting for 27 percent of the nation’s deaths in 2004.
Cancer was second, at about 23 percent, and strokes were third, at 6 percent.
The good news: The age-adjusted death rate for all three killers dropped. The heart-disease rate declined more than 6 percent, the cancer rate about 3 percent, and the stroke rate about 6.5 percent.
Improvements in medical care, particularly in medications aimed at preventing heart disease, at least partly explain the improvements in the heart- disease death rate, said Ken Thorpe, an Emory professor of health policy.
