There's a health divide across the Atlantic Ocean, a new study reveals: British adults in their 30s and 40s are faring better than their similarly-aged counterparts in the US, particularly in terms of cardiovascular health.
Scholars from both sides of the pond dug into data collected at various ages between 33 and 48 from two long-running health surveys: a UK cohort born in 1970, and from people in the US born between 1976 and 1983. Overall, they looked at health information on more than 20,000 people.
In terms of obesity, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol, the US group fared worse. What's more, socioeconomic health inequalities – in basic terms, the gap between the health of the poor and the rich – were greater in the US.
The team didn't look closely at the reasons for this disparity, but they do have some ideas about what's behind it. In addition, they say that the state-funded healthcare that's available in the UK could be playing a significant role.
"Worsening health trends in the US could serve as a warning for Britain and the need to focus on prevention and the broad social determinants of health," says epidemiologist Jennifer Dowd, from the University of Oxford in the UK.
In some cases, the results from the US were limited to non-Hispanic White people, to balance out differences in diversity in the two cohorts. Within this subsection, 19.3 percent of UK participants had hypertension in any form, for example, compared to 30.4 percent in the US group.
Obesity affected 34.5 percent of the UK group and 40.4 percent of the US group. With both hypertension and obesity, the most well-off Americans were in worse health or at the same level as the most disadvantaged Brits.
Those in Britain can't get complacent though, and have plenty of health issues of their own. More UK participants considered their own health to be poor compared with similar self-reported evaluations by US adults, and there was a higher percentage of smokers too.
"While we were unable to directly investigate the causes of this, we can speculate that differences in levels of exercise, diets and poverty, and limited access to free healthcare may be driving worse physical health in the US," says epidemiologist Charis Bridger Staatz, from University College London in the UK.
As the researchers note, previous studies suggest that the bigger the health gap between the privileged and the not-so-privileged, the worse the health of everyone – something that these new statistics would seem to show.
And the team behind the study suggests there is room for improvement across the board in both countries – through all the usual ways of promoting good health, including regular exercise, a good diet, and plenty of sleep.
Despite the worse health of Americans compared to British adults in midlife, higher rates of smoking and growing obesity levels in Britain show that there is room for improvement in both countries," says Dowd.
The research has been published in the International Journal of Epidemiology.