Release Date
Geography
Language of Resource
Full Text Available
Open Access / OK to Reproduce
Peer Reviewed
Objective
We report the chances of Black men aged 45 years dying of a drug overdose before age 60.
Findings/Key points
The life table shows that, for Black men who are 45 years of age in the United States, 1 in 52 (nearly 2%) is expected to die of drug overdose before reaching age 60, if current mortality rates persist. For White men, the estimate is 1 in 91 men (about 1%). The life table also shows that from age 45 to 59 years, the number of overdose deaths increased in the cohort of Black men but decreased in white men.
Design/methods
In our hypothetical cohort, we followed 100,000 non-Hispanic Black men aged 45 years for 15 years. All-cause death probabilities were obtained from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) 2021 life table series. Overdose mortality rates were obtained from the National Vital Statistics System through the Wide-Ranging Online Data for Epidemiologic Research of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC WONDER) database. We also constructed a period life table for a comparison group of white men.
