Mortality improvement slowed down in the early 21st Century but many explanations advanced, such as opioid use in the US or influenza epidemics and austerity programmes in the UK, seem unlikely to account for this phenomenon. In this project, MiSoC Co-I Emily Grundy and collaborator Mike Murphy (LSE) investigate the slowdown in mortality improvement in the US, UK and comparator countries observed in the first decade of the 21st century and critically evaluate proposed explanations. The researchers make use of change-point analysis to identify year of change in comparison to national mortality trends, and linear spline models in investigation of sub-national differences. Data comes from various sources, including the Human Mortality Database, the Global Burden of Disease cause-specific data and, for the UK, national statistics data. Consideration of the impact of using different methods to estimate overall mortality is also concluded together with a review of methodological assumptions made in previous studies. Initial results confirm the slowdown in mortality improvement observed in the early 21st century but indicate that proposed explanations for this are inadequate on a range of counts.
