The Influence of Rising Infant Mortality on falling/stalling Life Expectancy (brief report)

In the post-2010 period in England, largely attributable to austerity measures, two unexpected demographic trends emerged. Infant mortality rates rose and life expectancy at best stalled, and at worse fell. Various analyses of life expectancy trends have unpicked the age-specific mortality rates but without a focus on deaths to infants aged less than one year of age. Since this age-group is the first age in life expectancy calculations, it is possible that changes in infant mortality rates form part of changes in life expectancies. This brief report investigates time trends in infant mortality and life expectancy (LE) at birth between the years 2000 and 2019 by Index of Multiple Deprivation 2015 (income) quintile. Using 2014 as the ‘jump off’ year as this was when infant mortality began to rise, alternative scenarios for the first year of life in LE calculations are used to reveal whether any differences in LE at birth occur, including if the downward trends in infant mortality observed prior to 2014 had continued to 2019. Even though the trend-based model estimates an excess of nearly 1,400 infant deaths occurred, the results show no significant impact on the life expectancy at birth calculations between the observed and scenario-based infant mortalities. This is important for researchers to know since anyone seeking to understand pre-pandemic falling / stalling life expectancies can concentrate on other aspects to determine key reasons. Further work on infant mortality is required since, post-pandemic, rates have risen again.