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In the 19th and 20th centuries, outbreaks of diseases like yellow fever, smallpox and cholera caused the death rate in New York City to skyrocket and life expectancy to plummet. With the advent of modern medicine, the life expectancy in the city has steadily increased over the past 70 years...but it actually dropped in the past three years.
On Friday, the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene released its annual Summary of Vital Statistics, which documents a medley of eerie datasets on Gotham's population, ranging from the leading causes of death to overall life expectancy.
The report, which is a synthesis of health data from 2015, shows that the average life expectancy at birth for the entire city was 81.2. That figure marks a slights dip from 2014, when the life expectancy was 81.3. In the grand scheme of things, New Yorkers are in fact living longer—in 2006 the expected age for New Yorkers was 79.9.
How long New Yorkers tend to live is largely impacted by where they live—higher income areas have significantly higher life expectancies than their lower income counterparts. For example, Murray Hill and the Upper East Side had the highest life expectancies in the entire city at 85.9 each. Battery Park/Tribeca, Greenwich Village/Soho and Elmhurst/Corona in Queens followed.
The lowest expected age of demise among NYC's community districts was in Brownsville, Brooklyn, at 75.1 years, with Central Harlem and the Bronx's Morrisania tied for second at 76.2.
The report also showed exactly what is killing New Yorkers, and found that heart disease remained the leading cause of death in the city. Malignant neoplasms (read: cancer) was found to be the second-leading cause of death citywide. Those two causes led to more deaths in NYC than all other causes combined, an observation that ought to make you consider cutting back on the burgers and cigarettes.
You can find a map breaking down life expectancy by community district below, and read the full summary here.
