Life expectancy in England rising more slowly than rest of Europe

Telegraph

18-02-2025

Experts from the University of East Anglia have called for urgent action to help people get healthier, with poor diets and couch-potato lifestyles partly to blame.
Advances in life expectancy between 1990 and 2011 have been attributed to improvements in care for heart disease and cancer.
Poor diet, low levels of exercise and increasing body mass index scores have been linked to the slowdown of these improvements from 2011 to 2019.
Academics compared several factors linked to life expectancy across England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden.
Between 2019 and 2021, which includes the first part of the Covid-19 pandemic, most countries saw a fall in life expectancy except for Ireland, Iceland, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark.
Government action required
Researchers said that the countries which best maintained improvements in life expectancy had fewer heart disease and cancer deaths.
They called for government action to improve overall population health, including helping people have better diets and more exercise.
Prof Nick Steel, the lead author from UEA's Norwich Medical School, said heart disease was the main cause for the slowing progress in life expectancy since 2011, as well as the pandemic.
'Countries like Norway, Iceland, Sweden, Denmark, and Belgium held onto better life expectancy after 2011, and saw reduced harms from major risks for heart disease, helped by government policies,' he said.
'In contrast, England and the other UK nations fared worst after 2011 and also during the Covid pandemic, and experienced some of the highest risks for heart disease and cancer, including poor diets.'
He added: 'We have high dietary risks in England and high levels of physical inactivity and high obesity levels. These trends are decades long – there isn't a quick fix.'
He said the message to the current Government was that societal change needed to be bigger than 'easy access to scanners and a well man check or well woman check with your already overloaded GP'.
'This is about the big, long-term population protections from risk – so engaging with the food industry to improve our national diet to make it easier for people to eat healthier food and make it easier for people to move a little bit in our day-to-day lives.'
Natural longevity ceiling not yet reached
Prof Steel added: 'Life expectancy for older people in many countries is still improving, showing that we have not yet reached a natural longevity ceiling.
'Life expectancy mainly reflects mortality at younger ages, where we have lots of scope for reducing harmful risks and preventing early deaths.
'Comparing countries' national policies that improved population health were linked to better resilience to future shocks.'
Figures from the Office for National Statistics released last week show that about one in five girls born in the UK in 2030 is projected to live on average to at least 100 years old, rising to almost one in four by 2047.
The projections are lower for boys but still indicate a rise, with more than one in eight males born in 2030 living to celebrate their centenary, climbing to about one in six by 2047.
The study is published in The Lancet Public Health journal.