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  • Home > Blog > Asbestos > Asbestosis-Related Years of Potential Life Lost Before Age 65 Years – United States, 1968 – 2005
Posted on Wednesday, Dec 24, 2008

Asbestosis-Related Years of Potential Life Lost Before Age 65 Years – United States, 1968 – 2005

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has recently released a report detailing the numbers of deaths and years of productivity lost among people who died before 65 years-old because of asbestosis. The CDC’s report only looked at asbestosis-related deaths, so these numbers do not take into account deaths from any of the forms of malignant mesothelioma, such as pleural mesothelioma or peritoneal mesothelioma, or from asbestos-induced lung cancer. Even without including these other diseases, however, these numbers speak to the devastating effects that decades worth of asbestos use have had on human health.

To create this report, the CDC looked at all examples of asbestosis-related deaths between 1968 and 2005, which totaled 9,024. From within this figure, they identified 1,169 individuals who died between the ages of 25 and 64. 65 years-old is the common cutoff used to differentiate a hypothetical worker’s most productive years from his or her less productive ones, so asbestos-related deaths among people 65 and over were dropped from this study. Among the 1,169 cases identified, the CDC then developed a scale of “annual years of potential life lost before age 65”, which has been abbreviated to YPLL. This figure is the difference between a person’s age at time of death and 65, so a person who died at 55 had would have a YPLL of 10. The CDC looked at trends within these cases in 5-year periods and they also counted the total YPLL for the entire study period.

As we said above, there were 1169 individuals who died from asbestosis before they were 65. Total years of potential life lost were 7267 YPLL, with a mean YPLL for each person who died of 6.2 years. The CDC also reports that YPLL is increasing over time—even though asbestos use has been heavily regulated since the 1970s. For the first five years under steady (1968-1975), YPLL was 146.0. For the last five years however (2001-2005), YPLL was 239.6: an increase of 64%. While the available data on industry and occupation were a small subset of the total study population statistics, the study also showed that construction, ship building and repair, and military were the hardest hit industries, while insulation workers, and then administrations, plumbers and pipe and steamfitters were the hardest hit occupations.

This study is a further example of the tragedy of asbestos-related diseases in the United States and around the world. Even though regulations regarding the handling of asbestos have been in place for decades now, it’s clear from this study that more and more people are dying from asbestosis.