Walker County Alabama

Women of Walker County dying sooner; women in Alabama's cities living longer ...

A new study shows that life expectancy for women has declined in 313 U.S. counties, with Walker County, Alabama, among the 20 biggest losers.

Women in Walker County can expect to live almost 2 fewer years than they could have in 1987, according to the data released today by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.

The study period covered from 1987 until 2007 and the men of Walker County also saw their life expectancy shorten, though not by nearly as much.

At the same time, men and women living in Alabama's more urban areas generally are seeing their average lifespans increase or stay the same:

The study found that the places where women in particular were losing in life expectancy tended to be in the Southeast, the southern Midwest and Appalachia. Life expectancy for men only declined in 6 counties in the U.S.

So why can a little girl born today in Walker, Marion, Cullman, Marshall, Etowah, Dallas, Franklin, Fayette, Hale, St. Clair, Perry, Calhoun, Winston, Lamar and Pickens counties expect to live a shorter life than her mother?

The study's others said the decreases were particularly concentrated in Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee and West Virginia.

Ali Mokdad, a professor of global health at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, speculated that increases in major risk factors for chronic diseases — especially obesity and smoking among women — were probable, though not definitive, causes of lower life expectancy. For example, the number of Americans who are classified as obese hit 34 percent in 2010, more than double the rate in 1980.

Nutrition and child poverty rates also could play a role.

“We have talked about this trend as being the biggest decline in life expectancy since the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 in the U.S.,” Mokdad said.

The study used data culled from death certificates by the National Center for Health Statistics, an arm of the Centers for Disease Control.

Alabama's Walker County has steepest drop in women's life ...

Women in Walker County have seen the worst decline in life expectancy in the United States over 20 years, dropping by nearly two years, according to a new study that looks at life expectancy county by county.

Men in Walker County experienced the fourth-worst decline in the country, losing almost five months of life expectancy from 1987 to 2007. That makes the county the only one in the country to land in the bottom five for both genders.

"People in Walker should be asking their local leaders why they should have a life expectancy that is so far behind the rest of the country and getting worse," Ali Mokdad, a professor at the Institute for Health Metrics at the University of Washington, which produced the study, said Wednesday in an email.

The study, which was published in the online journal Population Health Metrics, says that, while life expectancy is mostly growing overseas, most U.S. counties -- especially those in the Deep South and Appalachia -- are not keeping pace.

The study looked at both genders. While life expectancies increased for men in all but a half-dozen U.S. counties, life expectancy for women declined in hundreds of counties. The authors theorized that an increase in female obesity and smoking, as well as related chronic diseases such as heart problems, may have hindered women's life expectancy while men stayed more stable or moved ahead.

And Walker County came in at the bottom of the list. Women there were likely to live 1.9 fewer years over the 20-year period -- life expectancy fell from 77.8 years in 1987 to 75.9 years in 2007 -- tying for worst place with Sunflower County, Miss. Life expectancy for Walker men dropped from 68.7 years to 68.3. Marion County also made the national bottom-20 list, with women there losing 1.2 years of life expectancy.

Karen Landers, Walker County's health officer, said Wednesday she hadn't seen the study but said that Walker's drop could be explained by the county's apparent high rate of people who smoke, are obese or have diabetes and heart problems, all major causes of mortality in Alabama and often-underestimated killers of women. In addition, county residents' low rate of insurance and high unemployment rate makes it hard for them to get the preventive care they need, she said.

Walker County ranked 65th out of Alabama's 67 counties for both health outcomes and mortality in a separate 2011 county health ranking conducted by the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Walker County, Alabama

Walker County, Alabama

Walker County, Alabama, 1907 census of Confederate soldiers : indexed and compiled from Alabama State Archives microfilm

Acts of the General Assembly of the state of Alabama

American law reports annotated