Current study
Among the bottom performers: Germany continues to fall behind in life expectancy
Compared to other Western European countries, Germany is lagging behind in life expectancy
© Christoph Soeder/dpa
When it comes to life expectancy, Germany lags behind the Western European average. Since 2000, the gap has grown by an entire year. What’s going wrong?
In 2000, Germany was around 0.7 years behind the average life expectancy at birth in Western Europe. By 2022, the gap has increased to 1.7 years. “The beginning of the 2000s marks a turning point in the dynamics of mortality development in Germany,” says BiB lead author Pavel Grigoriev, summarizing the results. Since then, the mortality gap between Germany and other Western European countries has grown relatively steadily.
Life expectancy in Germany: East Germany is catching up
As the study shows, after reunification, East Germany was initially able to significantly reduce the gap compared to West Germany and Western Europe. Financial investments in health care also contributed to this, it is said. “However, since the turn of the millennium, both West and East Germany have lost ground compared to the other countries in Western Europe,” says a statement from the Wiesbaden Federal Institute.
According to the researchers, individual age groups contribute in different ways to Germany’s growing gap in life expectancy. Among women in Germany, people aged 75 and over in particular have a higher mortality rate than their peers in other Western European countries. For men, on the other hand, the age group between 55 and 74 years of age particularly contributes to the gap. “With regard to the causes of death, the deficit was explained in particular by a higher mortality due to cardiovascular diseases,” writes the team in the “Bundesgesundheitsblatt”.
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There is a need to catch up in prevention and early detection
For BiB Research Director Sebastian Klüsener, there is a need for action, especially in the prevention and early detection of cardiovascular diseases. The same applies to the areas of tobacco and alcohol prevention and healthy nutrition. “There is still a lot of potential here to better prepare us for the current aging process in society,” said Klüsener. The study compared data from a total of 15 countries in Western Europe, including Switzerland, Austria, Denmark, Great Britain and Finland.