By Will Dunham WASHINGTON, March 16 (Reuters) - White Americans continue to live longer than blacks but declines in black death rates from AIDS, homicide and injuries and, among black women, heart disease helped shrink the gap, researchers said on Friday. Tracking the period from 1983 to 2003, they found the life expectancy racial gap widened in the 1980s as AIDS and murders fueled by the crack cocaine trade took a higher toll on younger blacks, then contracted in the 1990s as those factors eased. The gap closed to an historic low of 5.3 years in 2003 from 7.1 years in 1993, according to the study based on an analysis of U.S. government mortality data. Higher black mortality from heart disease was the biggest contributor to the gap. Writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers led by Sam Harper of McGill University in Montreal said life expectancy for U.S. blacks in 2003 was 72.7 years, compared to 78 years for whites -- all-time highs for both. The gap was wider among men (69 years for blacks, 75.3 for whites) than women (76.1 years for blacks, 80.5 for whites). In fact, black women had a longer life expectancy than white men. "We've made some important progress in reducing the black-white gap," Harper said in an interview. "The other message that we want to emphasize is that there still remains a pretty substantial gap. And in terms of making additional progress, what we really should be focusing on is cardiovascular disease," Harper said. U.S. whites have lived longer than blacks for as long as such statistics have keep kept, dating to the mid-19th century. The overall long-term trend has been toward longer life for both groups but the size of the racial gap has fluctuated periodically due to various factors. GENDER COMPARISONS From 1993 to 2003, the life expectancy gap between white and black women declined by a year -- half of which was due to improvements in mortality among blacks in heart disease, homicide and unintentional injuries. The gap among men during the same period was cut even more -- by two years -- amid lower death rates from homicide, AIDS and unintentional injuries. A stubborn lack of progress in death rates of older black men from heart disease prevented the gap from tightening even more, the study found. Higher black mortality from cardiovascular disease accounted for 30 percent of the life expectancy gap among the men and 40 percent of the gap among women, Harper noted. Worse mortality among blacks from kidney disease, bloodstream infections and infant mortality also contributed to the gap. The higher AIDS death rates among blacks accounted for half a year of the gap among men, while higher murder death rates accounted for a full year -- meaning those two factors represented about a quarter of the male life expectancy gap. Harper said that since the study period ended in 2003 some of the positive trends seen in black AIDS and homicide deaths appear to have since flattened out.
