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Study shows British enjoy healthier lives than Americans(Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, The (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) MILWAUKEE _ Maybe we should have remained a colony. Compared with the British, white, middle-aged Americans are substantially less healthy, according to a study published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Pick the disease _ diabetes, heart disease, stroke, cancer, lung disease, high blood pressure _ and Americans are much more likely to have it than their counterparts on the other side of the pond. "Americans are much sicker than the English," the study concluded. Adding insult to injury, Americans pay more than twice as much for their medical care as the Brits, $5,274 a year per person in the United States vs. $2,164 in England, the study notes. Doctors not associated with the study say it is the latest evidence of befuddling health disparities in the United States compared with other industrialized countries. It also dispels the often-cited erroneous claim that America has the best health care in the world, doctors said. "In some cases, the wealthiest Americans were sicker than England's poorest," said Julie Mitchell, an assistant professor of medicine at the Medical College of Wisconsin who practices at Froedtert Memorial Lutheran Hospital. "That's crazy." Indeed, when the researchers divided people from the two countries by both education and income levels, Americans with higher incomes and who were more educated often had higher rates of ailments such as diabetes, cancer and heart disease than English who were in the bottom strata. The study looked at health data and self-reported disease rates among 4,386 Americans aged 55 to 64 and 3,681 Brits in the same age range. To eliminate the confounding issue of race and health status, only non-Hispanic whites were included in the analysis. The data came from government-funded health surveys in the two countries. The study was sponsored by the governments of the two countries. Overall, the diabetes rate was 6.1 percent in England vs. 12.5 percent in the United States. The cancer rate was 5.5 percent in England, compared with 9.5 percent in the United States. The heart disease rate was 9.6 percent in England, compared with 15.1 percent in the United States. The study is one of the few attempts to compare illness rates in the United States and England while doing so for people with comparable social status, said co-author Michael Marmot, a physician and epidemiologist at University College London. Marmot said that it has been known for years that life expectancy is shorter in the U.S. than in the United Kingdom. More than 20 countries have greater life expectancy than the U.S. Now there is evidence that disease rates also are higher, he said. "And they are higher for people of high education, intermediate education and low education," he said. The disparity remained even after researchers adjusted for various risk factors such as smoking and obesity. Obesity is much more common in the U.S., while heavy drinking is more prevalent in England. Smoking rates in the two countries are about the same. Doctors said the differing illness rates likely are the result of a variety of factors. Even though much more money is spent on health care in the United States, the emphasis is different. In England, much more attention is paid on primary care and making sure everyone gets basic medical care. "You get to the problems earlier," said Barbara Starfield, a distinguished professor of health policy and management at Johns Hopkins University. "They are much better with children, also." She noted that health care in the United Kingdom itself is not the best in the industrialized world. So, for the United States to have higher disease rates than England supports other research showing that American health care ranks well below many other industrialized countries. The study suggests that the United States is not using its health care dollars to the greatest benefit, said Andrew Bindman, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco who has studied the health care systems of the two countries. "Is our strategy of innovation, technology and specialization getting us the return on investment?" said Bindman, who was not a part of the study. Bindman also said lower rates of exercise in the United States and a propensity for eating processed junk food here also may explain some of the higher United States disease rates. To bolster their findings, the researchers used a separate database of biological markers of disease among more than 7,600 white people aged 40 to 70 from the two countries. Once again, they found a troubling pattern in the United States. For instance, there were higher levels of inflammatory substances such as C-reactive protein and lower levels of HDL cholesterol (the good kind) in Americans. The study's authors did not identify the causes of health disparities between the two countries. However, they suggested it might be related to stress from the circumstances under which people live and work in the two countries. Some of it may be due to the effects of social rank and status, they added. Whatever the causes, doctors said, the U.S. health care system needs to devote a lot more attention to the issue. "We need to figure this out because it's making us sick," Mitchell said. ___ (c) 2006, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Visit JSOnline, the Journal Sentinel's World Wide Web site, at http://www.jsonline.com/ Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services. 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