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New York • The U.S. death rate has been falling for decades, but researchers have detected one group in which the rates have been steadily ticking up: middle-aged white people. Suicides and deaths from drug overdose and alcohol abuse are being blamed.

Deaths rates for other races have continued to fall, as they have for whites 65 and older. But as death rates for white people 35 to 44 have been level recently, they're beginning to turn up for whites 55 to 64, and — most strikingly — death rates for whites ages 45 to 54 have risen by half a percent per year since 1998, said the authors, Anne Case and Angus Deaton of Princeton University.

The increase started in the late 1990s and probably is related to the increased availability around that time of certain prescription painkillers, they said.

"It certainly can't be helping," said Deaton, who last month was awarded a Nobel Prize in economics for unrelated work on consumer spending.

Their paper was published online Monday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Federal researchers have reported — repeatedly — on worrisome increases in deaths from suicides and drug overdoses. And they have noted the bulk of those deaths have been middle-aged whites. So the Case and Deaton findings aren't exactly surprising, said Robert Anderson, who oversees the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention branch that monitors death statistics.

But the Princeton pair broke down the death numbers by age and race in a way the government has not highlighted, he added.

"White Americans who are middle-aged were really doing worse," Case summarized. "And that's not news we were hearing."

There has not been a similar increase in middle-aged people living in other affluent countries, the researchers said.

White death rates still are not nearly as bad as black rates — not even for those 45 to 54. The rate is about 415 deaths for every 100,000 white people in that age group. For blacks, it's 582 per 100,000.

U.S. death rates have been on a general decline for more than century, thanks mainly to public health measures and advances in medical treatment. In recent decades, the improvement has been driven by declines in death rates from heart disease and cancer — the nation's two leading killers.