“It’s even worse than it looks,” Keith Humphreys, an addiction specialist at Stanford University, told The Washington Post. Evidence suggests that studies could be underestimating opioid deaths by 20 percent or more, as reported in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
“Even if you ignored deaths from all other drugs, the opioid epidemic alone is deadlier than the AIDS epidemic at its peak,” Humphreys said.
In addition to higher numbers of opioid-related deaths, deaths from eight of the top ten leading causes of death in the U.S. also increased in 2016 contributing to the lifespan decline. The mortality rate from stroke and heart disease, the two leading causes of death in the United States, increased in 2016 after steadily decreasing in recent years.