Not everyone has an equal opportunity to live a long and healthy life, as is evidenced by the wide disparities in life expectancy throughout the State of Ohio. There is much more to health than health care; the conditions in the community in which you live
Not everyone has an equal opportunity to live a long and healthy life, as is evidenced by the wide disparities in life expectancy throughout the State of Ohio. There is much more to health than health care; the conditions in the community in which you live influence how healthy you will be and how long you will live. Being able to measure health outcomes at the very local level is important if we are to shape policies and services that improve these conditions for vulnerable communities. It is in that spirit that the U.S Small-Area Life Expectancy Estimates Project (USALEEP)  came to be, and through this research, we are able to look at life expectancy at the census tract level. As of 2017, the average life expectancy at birth in the United States was 78.6 years. Individuals who are 65 years old can expect to live an additional 19.4 years on average. Life expectancy is a broad measure of the overall health of communities, and although life expectancy in the U.S. has risen dramatically over several decades, it has actually fallen slightly for the past few years. Some researchers attribute this to increases in suicide and drug overdose deaths. Measuring life expectancy at birth gives us a good picture of the longevity and health of the next generation, while looking at life expectancy at age 65 can give us a picture of older adults as they enter retirement age.
In areas where a higher percentage of the population is Black, life expectancy tends to be lower
The interactive mapping tool below allows you to enter an address or navigate to almost anywhere in the State of Ohio and find out what the life expectancy is for that area. Areas of the map that are gray are tracts for which there was no data available (USALEEP does not provide life-expectancy data for census tracts with a standard error more than four years, due to lack of confidence in these estimates. This means researchers were not at least 95 percent confident in these estimates as they were in the average of all of the reported estimates.)
Included in the call out box for each area is the life expectancy at birth (how long a newborn can expect to live), as well as the life expectancy at age 65 (how many additional years a 65-year-old can expect to live). We have also included some demographic information for each of the tracts: the poverty rate, the percentage of the population that is white and the percentage of the population that is Black. The demographic information is important because both