• Posted February 3, 2025

Young Adults Are Dying Earlier Than Expected

Young adults keep dying at higher-than-expected rates, falling prey to drug overdose and poor health, a new study says.

The death rate among adults 25 to 44 was 70% higher in 2023 than it would have been had pre-2011 trends continued, researchers reported in a new study published Jan. 31 in JAMA Network Open.

“Although mortality rates decreased after the core pandemic years, excess mortality remained higher than expected based on prepandemic levels,” the research team led by Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota, concluded.

This trend started prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, with early deaths among adults 25 to 44 nearly 35% higher than expected in 2019.

Then during the pandemic, excess deaths among young adults nearly tripled compared with 2019, researchers found.

By 2023, the pandemic-era death surge among young adults had subsided somewhat, but early deaths remained 70% higher than expected. 

“These results suggest the possibility of a worsening mortality crisis unless these trends are reversed,” researchers concluded.

Drug overdoses accounted for nearly 32% of deaths among young adults in 2023, researchers found. About 14% died in accidents, nearly 9% due to alcohol use and 8% in homicides.

“The largest portion of 2023 excess mortality was driven by drug poisoning, but many other external and natural causes exceeded what prior trends would have projected,” researchers wrote.

Even diseases usually thought of as affecting older people, like heart disease and diabetes, are contributing to early deaths among young adults, said Dr. Sanjey Gupta, senior vice president and director of emergency medicine for Northwell Health in Hempstead, N.Y.

“Unfortunately, we have a much higher percentage of our youth who suffer from some of the diseases that we used to attribute to old age," Gupta, who was not involved in the study, said in a Northwell Health news release.

"So hypertension and diabetes and obesity -- we're encountering children with these illnesses. And as they are aging, they're getting the additive effect of having these diseases for long term,” he added.

The two distinct phases of increasing early deaths, before and after 2020, might indicate that the pandemic continues to stalk the health of young adults, researchers said.

Some young adults might be dealing with the long-term consequences of severe COVID infections, while others might have overlooked impending health problems because the pandemic disrupted usual medical services.

More information

Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has more on early deaths among Americans.

SOURCES: JAMA Network Open, study, Jan. 31, 2025; Northwell Health, news release, Jan. 31, 2025