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Fatal drug overdoses increased 386.5% between 1999 and 2017 among people in midlife, the study found. Meanwhile, midlife death rates tied to alcohol use, including chronic liver disease and cirrhosis of the liver, rose 40.6% during that same time period. And midlife suicide rates in those years increased 38.3%.

\"PHOTO:
Spencer Platt/Getty Images, FILE
PHOTO: Men sit passed out in a park where heroin users gather to shoot up in the Bronx borough of New York, May 4, 2018.
>

Even though U.S. life expectancy peaked in 2014 at 78.9 years, it dropped to 78.6 years by 2017, according to the study, which used data from the U.S. Mortality Database and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's WONDER database.

Those most affected, Woolf said, were living in the Ohio Valley region — Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky and Indiana — as well as in New England, which includes New Hampshire, Maine and Vermont. All of these areas have been hit particularly hard by the opioid epidemic or by economic distress, Woolf noted.

\"It's possible to blame some of this on the opioid epidemic,\" Woolf said. \"[But] it isn't lost on us that these are the regions of the country that have been hit so hard by the economy -- the Rust Belt, where manufacturing jobs have been lost and steel mills have closed.\"

\"Families and communities have been dealing with many years of economic strain,\" he continued. \"That strain itself could affect health in ways that don't have to be limited to [cause] despair or unhealthy behaviors.\"

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