American kids are less likely to reach adulthood than foreign peers

Babies and children in the United States are nearly twice as likely to die before reaching adulthood compared with their peers in other wealthy countries, according to a new study.

The health of U.S. children has deteriorated since the early 2000s across a range of measures, researchers from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of California, Los Angeles found. They published their findings last month in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The study compared infant and child deaths in the U.S. with the figures from 18 other high-income nations between 2007 to 2023.

U.S. infants, children and teens were about 1.8 times more likely to die before reaching adulthood compared with young people in peer countries, researchers discovered.

For babies, the two caus