Article Text
PDF
Abstract
Introduction The homicide rates among young men in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) are the highest in the world. It is not clear how this has impacted the life expectancy in these countries. This research has two purposes: (1) to quantify the impact of homicides on the mortality gap between LAC and high-income countries over recent years and (2) to assess the changes in homicide impact in overall survival over time.
Methods Causes of death data were extracted for 23 countries in the LAC and 15 European countries (average European union-15 [EU-15]), using UN, UNODC, WHO, HMD and IHME databases for the period 2005–2014. The contribution by homicide deaths to the change in life expectancy, over time and as a difference between two populations, was quantified using decomposition methods.
Results The contribution by homicide mortality to changes in life expectancy levels differed widely across the examined LAC countries. In Honduras, homicide mortality accounted for 1.75 (95% CI 1.64 to 1.86) and 6.30 (95% CI 6.07 to 6.53) years lower life expectancy than in the EU-15 countries for women and men, respectively. Contrary to this, homicide was just accountable for less than a couple of months of life expectancy differences between Chile and EU-15. Jamaica had the largest reduction in homicides and its impact increased life expectancy over time by almost half a year for men. However, Mexican men and Honduran women have experienced increases in mortality by homicide, which decreased their life expectancy by more than a quarter of a year between 2005 and 2014.
Conclusions Excess mortality related to homicides in young people accounted for major changes in life expectancy in the LAC region. Furthermore, reducing excess mortality due to homicides is a crucial goal to further increase longevity towards levels of low-mortality countries. These reductions might prevent homicides spreading to other parts of Latin America. Decision and policy-makers in LAC need to address this immediately, and investing in the young population needs to be given a high priority.
- medical demography
- public health
- life expectancy
- Latin America and the Caribbean
- homicides
- violence
This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Footnotes
VC-R and JMA contributed equally.
Handling editor Seye Abimbola
Contributors Both authors were actively involved in conceptualising the study. VC-R and JMA conducted the data management and analysis. Both authors were actively engaged in discussing the ongoing progress of the analysis and interpretation of findings. VC-R drafted and revised the manuscript on the basis of comments provided by JMA. Both authors have approved the final version of the manuscript. VC-R is the final guarantor of the study.
Funding This study was funded by World Bank Group (Short term consultancy project).
Competing interests None declared.
Patient and public involvement statement This study involved secondary data analysis of public sources, which did not involve patients nor public (PPI).
Patient consent for publication Not required.
Ethics approval This study involved secondary data analysis of public sources, which did not have any individual identifiers, therefore ethics approval from our respective Institutional Review Board (IRB) was not required.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
Data sharing statement The full datasets are publicly available online and can also be requested from the corresponding author.