The best findings in science aren’t the ones that make you go “cool!”, they’re the ones that make you go “huh?”

A study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reported a strange and unexpected finding. By looking at data from the CDC, researchers were able to evaluate mortality rates per 100,000 individuals, and compare this between ethnic groups. While there’s generally been a decrease in all-cause mortality, they found an increase in the mortality of middle-aged white non-Hispanic men and women in the US between 1999 and 2013 (solid red line below). This finding was unique to middle-aged White Americans – data from other countries also reported a drop in death rates.

So what makes White, middle-aged, non-Hispanic Whites unique?

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