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Middle-aged White Americans have a very high death rate which is caused due to sluggish heart disease and common illness processes, revealed a research analyzing the crisis that is a big cause of concern for the policymakers and the health care officials. The high mortality rate has become the core focus recently after increased rising toll of deaths caused due to suicide and drug abuse. However, a recent report from a New York-based Commonwealth Fund reveals that drugs and suicide are only partial responsible. The big culprit of this disturbing trend is possibly due to poor medical systems and the huge changes in the economy. "We are accustomed to making progress against diseases. We learn how to prevent them and how to treat them, and as we do that, fewer people die from them," said Dr. David Blumenthal, a co-author of the study and president of the fund. "For middle-aged whites, that progress has stalled and even reversed for some conditions. We need to find out why this is happening," says Tribune Live

"There is clearly something going on that is troubling," said Samuel Preston, a University of Pennsylvania demographer who headed a 2011 panel that looked at life expectancies in high-income countries. The evidence regarding the troublesome life expectancy trends in the United States suggests that several men and women had died much younger than their counterparts a generation ago.

The focus on middle-aged white Americans came when a pair of Princeton University economists, Anne Case and Nobel Laureate Angus Deaton, published a commendable article that revealed a staggering death rate that had increased since 1999, specifically among non-Latino white Americans, aged between 45 and 54. The researchers did not find this trend in Latinos and African-Americans, even though there is a huge health gap between non-whites and whites, as reported by Tribune Live