Life Expectancy

Holiday cooking means breaking out an arsenal of ingredients that hardly see the outside of the pantry for the rest of the year. Or maybe years. Should you really use that brown sugar you bought four years ago? Is it OK that last year's allspice looks a little crusty? This year, instead of stressing, use this guide to help determine whether you can still use those holiday holdovers and everyday staples.  

After last week's column, several readers wrote in to suggest that perhaps I could not tell the difference between Audrina Patridge and Whitney Port, two airheads from MTV's docudrama The Hills . Guilty. But in my own defense, I don't think Patridge and Port can either. Anyway, from here on out, I have an alibi for any and all errors: I'm in a terrible hurry due to the fact that I don't have much time left on this Earth. A study released by Australian researchers this week finds that TV watching after age 25 dramatically reduces life expectancy.

ATLANTA - U.S. life expectancy has hit another all-time high, rising above 78 years. The estimate of 78 years, 2 months is for a baby born in 2009 and comes from a preliminary report released Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About 2.4 million people died in the United States in 2009 - roughly 36,000 fewer deaths than the previous year. Deaths were down for a range of causes, from heart disease to homicide, so experts don't think there is one simple explanation for the increase in life expectancy.

The nation's latest mortality statistics show that men are catching up to women in the life expectancy race, or it could be that women are simply slowing down. But the good news from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which released the preliminary report earlier this month, is that life expectancy for all Americans, male and female, has reached an all-time high. Data announced by the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics listed life expectancy at 77.6 years in 2003, the most current figure, up from 77.3 in 2002.

The news that humans' life span might be doubled in the next century is cause for sober and deliberate contemplation. Dr. Gregory Stock of the School of Medicine at UCLA, encouraged by experimental successes with roundworms and fruit flies, bats and canaries, and mice of different sizes, impaneled his colleagues in the allied sciences to discuss what one attendee calls "the big enchilada" - the prospect of humans reconfigured to live 150 or 200 years....

When demographer James Vaupel's daughter, Anna, was born in 1984, he ran some calculations: Anna, and American girls like her, would live to age 100. S. Jay Olshansky's daughter, Jessica, was born the same year. When Olshansky, also a demographer, read of Vaupel's research, he made his own estimate: Jessica and her peers had a life expectancy of merely 85. Little Jessica wasn't too happy when she learned about the predictions. "Daddy," she told her father, "I hope your friend's right.

For more than a century, parents could anticipate that their children would enjoy longer lives than their own. Obesity may be changing that. In today's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers report that the epidemic already has reduced U.S. life expectancy by four to nine months. And they project that obesity will stall - or even reverse by two to five years - future gains in lifespan in the decades ahead as today's growing legions of overweight children reach adulthood and start dealing with weight-related health problems such as diabetes and heart disease.

Major increases in life expectancy are setting the stage for health-care challenges in the 21st century in the United States and other nations, a Census Bureau study to be released today shows. "While the pace of aging varies, all nations are, or soon will be, facing important issues regarding health care for their expanding older populations," said Kevin Kinsella, who wrote the report with Yvonne J. Gist. "Most issues will affect elderly women, who greatly outnumber elderly men in most nations.

The big companies that run thousands of funeral homes, cemeteries and crematoria around the country are in a somber mood. Revenue is down, profit is scarce, and the nation's death rate has declined for two straight years. While the total number of deaths has been rising slightly each year, the 2001 death rate - 848.5 per 100,000 of population - was the lowest since it dipped to 848.1 in 1992, according to the latest full-year numbers from the National Vital Statistics System.

BEFORE I TOOK a recent flight from L.A. to New York and on to Portugal, my family and I spent weeks debating whether the benefits of taking this trip to attend a conference were worth the risk. Then I realized that if the trip was worth the risk before Sept. 11, it still is. The reason I'm not changing my life to avoid terrorist threats is that, despite the enormity of the loss of life and property in the attacks, my risks - and yours - have not changed much since Sept. 11. To put a clinically objective perspective on the risk of death by terrorism, it is useful to look at how the increased risk affects the life expectancy of each of us. According to the most recent Statistical Abstract of the United States, our average age is about 35, with an average remaining life expectancy of about 43 years.

DETROIT - Days before critical primary elections, Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney outlined a far-reaching plan Friday to gradually delay Americans' eligibility for Medicare as well as Social Security. Romney said the shift as people live longer was needed to steer the giant benefit programs toward economic sustainability. Speaking to the Detroit Economic Club - in cavernous Ford Field, where the Detroit Lions football team plays - he also made a play for primary election support in Michigan, which votes on Tuesday along with Arizona.

Researchers identified 37 scenarios when commonly ordered medical tests do no good and may even cause harm. Cost was not considered. Value - the extent to which benefits outweigh harms - was the key. But patients are encouraged to go beyond this list and ask questions about any ordered test. The following are in no particular order: Repeating screening ultrasonography for abdominal aortic aneurysm following a negative study. Performing coronary angiography in patients with chronic stable angina with well-controlled symptoms on medical therapy or who lack specific high-risk criteria on exercise testing.

ATLANTA - For the first time in almost half a century, homicide has fallen off the list of the nation's top-15 causes of death. The 2010 list, released by the government yesterday, reflects at least two major trends: Murders are down, and deaths from certain diseases are on the rise as the population ages. Homicide was overtaken at No. 15 by pneumonitis, seen mainly in people 75 and older. It happens when food goes down the windpipe and causes deadly damage to the lungs. This is the first time since 1965 that homicide failed to make the list, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Mindfulness classes pay off Chalk another one up for mindfulness classes. A study in Norway of 73 patients with painful joint diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis found that mindfulness exercises reduced stress and fatigue and that patients maintained the improvement a year later. Mindfulness exercises help patients focus on the present. In 10 group sessions, patients were taught to deliberately think about their feelings and bodily experiences without judging or trying to avoid them.

A Bucks County jury awarded $14 million Monday to a former Pennsbury High student who lost her left leg when she was run over by a school bus in 2007. The jury of eight women and four men voted unanimously to award 21-year-old Ashley Zauflik $2.9 million for past and future medical costs and $11.1 million for pain, suffering, and disfigurement. Minutes after the verdict, the Fairless Hills woman stood on her right leg and hugged relatives, friends, and her lead attorney, Thomas Kline, while she smiled through tears.

A former Pennsbury High School student who lost a leg when a school bus ran over her in 2007 will need $5.4 million to cover medical costs for the rest of her life, experts testified Thursday on her behalf in Bucks County Court. Audrey Zauflik, now 21, of Fairless Hills, is suing the school district for monetary damages plus pain and suffering for the accident that crushed her pelvis, injured her spine, and left her in a medically induced coma for a month. Her left leg was amputated above the knee to save her life.

LAGOS, NIGERIA - In Nigeria, newborn twins have to share a bassinet in a crowded public hospital that doesn't have enough electricity. "Where there is life, there is hope," their mother said. But as the world's population surpasses seven billion, fears are stirring anew about how the planet will cope with the needs of so many humans. The United Nations marked the milestone yesterday, even though it is impossible to pinpoint the arrival of the globe's seven billionth occupant because millions of people are born and die each day. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the day was "not about one newborn or even one generation" but "about our entire human family.

Why do Americans die younger, on average, than people in most other industrialized nations? One reason, say University of Pennsylvania researchers, is that we're fatter. Much fatter. And fatter younger . Average life expectancy at age 50 in the United States was reduced in 2006 by 1.54 years for women and 1.85 years for men by unhealthy weight, they calculated. And while just about all developed countries have a fat problem, ours is so much more severe that solving it would wipe out between one-fifth and more than half of the relative shortfall in U.S. longevity.

Burn in hell, Gadhafi I knew a young man named Nicholas Bright. He was extremely sharp, good-looking, well-mannered, and very likable. He worked for a management consulting firm that was hired by our mother company, Dun & Bradstreet, to assist upper management at R.H. Donnelley Corp. It wasn't easy for someone that young to have to tell senior executives what they needed to change. Yet Nicholas was capable and successful in doing it, and he did it with style. One afternoon I walked into a colleague's office.