Michael Wolfson, University of Ottawa – Where You Live May Determine how Long You Live

Choosing where to live can be a big decision and can even impact your life expectancy.

Michael Wolfson, research chair and faculty of medicine at the University of Ottawa, discusses why.

Michael Wolfson is a former assistant chief statistician at Statistics Canada and current member of the University of Ottawa’s Centre for Health Law, Policy and Ethics.

Where You Live May Determine how Long You Live

How long you can expect to live varies with where you live.  Life expectancy differences across neighborhoods within the largest American or Canadian cities are more than a decade.

Even though Canada has over three years higher life expectancy than the U.S., a new study shows these gaps in life expectancy across neighborhoods in Canada’s largest cities are as large as in U.S. cities.

These large inequalities are associated with poverty rates and family incomes.  However, in the U.S. cities studied, these socio-economic factors have much stronger influences on life expectancy gaps.

While the U.S. claims to be a “kinder and gentler nation,” and the land of opportunity, U.S. society is considerably more unequal; Canada has twice as much income mobility from one generation to the next.

In America, there is increasing attention to so-called “deaths of despair,” mainly affecting males in early adulthood.  But there is growing evidence that a more pervasive cause of shorter life expectancies is chronic stress.

Canadians do not have to worry nearly as much as Americans about being bankrupted by huge health care bills, and they can receive more generous safety net benefits when becoming unemployed or falling into poverty.

Canadians’ educational opportunities are also more equally distributed.  Residents of wealthy neighborhoods are more likely to attend city-wide public schools, while in the U.S., these neighborhoods often “opt out” to form separate school districts or send their children to private schools.

These differences between Canadian and U.S. society likely account for the weaker (but still present) relationships between the wealth or poverty of where you live and how long you can expect to live.  But the reasons for the very wide ranges in life expectancy across Canadian cities remain a mystery.

Read More:
[Statistics Canada] – Extent and socioeconomic correlates of small area variations in life expectancy in Canada and the United States