Drug poisoning, cardiometabolic conditions, and social factors drive death increases in people aged 25–44.
Young Americans are dying at unprecedented rates, with a new study showing a surge in mortality driven by drug poisoning, alcohol-related deaths, and emerging health challenges.
Young adult deaths in 2023 were 70 percent higher than they would have been if pre-2011 trends had continued.
“One surprising thing about the increases in these causes of death are that these are causes of death that primarily kill people at much older ages,” Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, associate professor of sociology, associate director at Minnesota Population Center, and study author, told The Epoch Times.
Major Trends
The study, published in JAMA Network Open, examined over 3.3 million deaths of Americans aged 25–44 between 1999 and 2023. There were two distinct trends in rise in mortality, with a rise from 2011 to 2019, and a significant higher rise from 2020 to 2023.
Unnatural causes of death, like drug poisoning, were the leading cause of death in young adults, constituting a third of all deaths in 2023.
Drug poisoning has been the leading cause of death among young adults since 2014, with a sharp rise in 2020 and a stable excess death rate since. The researchers did not offer an explanation of how drug poisoning contributed to these deaths.
With the exception of COVID-19, most of the leading causes of death in young adults were not-health related.
Besides drug poisoning, the other top five causes of death in 2023 are deaths from natural causes (16 percent of excess deaths), transport-related deaths (just over 14 percent), alcohol-related deaths (almost 9 percent), and homicide (slightly over 8 percent).
Compared to pre-2011 trends, deaths from most causes were significantly higher than expected. This “excess mortality” was 35 percent higher in 2019, then spiked during the pandemic, nearly tripling by 2021, the authors said.
While excess deaths decreased somewhat in 2023, they remained far above pre-pandemic levels. Overall, 2023 mortality for young adults was 70 percent higher than projected, representing 71,124 excess deaths.
