SAN DIEGO--The human longevity bonanza that gives newborns today three decades more of life expectancy than they would have had a century ago appears to have no real stopping point. Now researchers are trying to determine how U.S. society should change to accommodate so many longer, healthier lifespans, and why one group of white Americans does not seem to be benefiting from the trend.

Published in the August issue of Health Affairs and reported widely in the media, the researchers study found that while everybody else is living longer, non-Hispanic white women without high school diplomas have actually lost five years of life expectancy and their male counterparts lost three years.

The More Educated Doing Better, Less Educated Doing Worse

The MacArthur Foundation Network on Aging in Society, which produced the report, is now pursuing questions arising from this finding including the stunning impact education has on longevity, for everybody except African American males.

The idea that subgroups of the population dont all experience the same longevity has been known for a long time, said the studys lead author, S. Jay Olshansky, at the Gerontological Society of Americas recent annual meeting in San Diego.

But until the 15 members of the network attempted to map the U.S. society of the future, no one had looked beyond the three basic divisions of education levels: 12 years of school or less, bachelors degree or less, and post-graduate study.

One of the things we did was break down this 12-and-under subgroup into those that had a high school education and those that didnt make it that far, Olshansky said, and thats when we saw something we didnt expect to see.

Overall, life expectancy has increased from about 47 years at birth in 1900 to more than 78, according to federal health statistics.

Aside from the bad news for the least educated whites and African American males, the study identified a remarkable 10-year gap in life expectancy between the least-educated and most-educated Americans, said Olshansky, a public health professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In 1990, he added, that gap was two years wide.

The more educated are doing better and the least educated are doing worse, he said. This disparity comes just when biologists are on the verge of learning how to slow the human aging process, he added.

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Study: Education Extends Longevity—Except for Black Males