Contributions of injury deaths to changes in life expectancy and disparity: A comparative analysis of G7 countries over two decades

TL;DR

Injury deaths had a small overall impact on life expectancy and disparity in G7 countries, but varied significantly by country, sex, and cause.

Contribution

This study quantifies the specific contributions of injury deaths to changes in life expectancy and disparity across G7 countries over two decades.

Findings

Injury deaths had negligible net contributions to life expectancy and disparity changes in G7 countries combined.

Transport accidents improved life expectancy and reduced disparity, especially in males.

Unintentional poisoning had a strong negative impact, particularly in the USA, UK, and Canada.

Abstract

Despite the high level of economic development in the Group of Seven (G7) countries, injury deaths remain a public health concern in these countries. This paper examines the contribution of injury deaths to changes in life expectancy (LE) and life disparity (LD) in the G7 countries.

We used annual data from the WHO mortality database to compute LE and LD during 2001-03 and 2017-19. The contributions of injury deaths to LE and LD changes for each sex were decomposed by age and cause using a continuous-change model.

Across the G7 countries combined, LE (LD) increased by 2.12 (0.25) and 2.73 (0.16) years for females and males, respectively. While most injury-related deaths contributed to increases in LE and decreases in LD, these gains were offset by negative contributions of unintentional poisoning, resulting in an overall negligible net contributions of injury deaths to changes in LE/LD across the G7 countries combined. The country-specific patterns revealed notable variations. Positive contributions of injury-related causes to changes in LE were more prominent in France (+ 0.38/+0.64 years for females/males), while negative contributions were most evident in the USA (-0.23/-0.42 years for females/males). Transport accidents emerged as the leading contributors to improvements in both LE and LD among both sexes in all countries, with more pronounced effects in males. In contrast, unintentional poisoning had a substantial negative impact, particularly among younger populations in the USA, UK, and Canada.

Injury deaths made negligible contributions to overall changes in LE and LD across the G7 countries combined during the study period. However, there were important variations by sex, age, cause and country. Specifically, unfavourable contributions of injury deaths were mainly observed in the USA, UK, and Canada. These findings highlight the need for targeted, country-specific injury prevention strategies to mitigate premature and unequal mortality.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12963-025-00409-6.

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