In a city like Madrid, men live, on average, three years longer in the Chamartín neighborhood, with greater purchasing power, than in Puente de Vallecas, a working-class area. The trend is similar worldwide, because economic capacity correlates with health and life expectancy. However, according to a recent publication in The New England Journal of Medicine, this dynamic changes when comparing the rich and poor in the U.S. and Europe.

The study, led by Irene Papanicolas, a professor of health services at the Brown School of Public Health, sampled 73,000 Americans and Europeans aged between 50 and 85. They were followed since 2010 to observe the effect of wealth on an individual’s likelihood of dying. First, it was found that, in both the U.S. and Europe, the rich lived longer than the poor, although the gap was much greater in the United States.

This finding was consistent with previous studies showing that the wealthy live longer, but when the comparison was made across continents, the result was even more surprising. Mortality rates across all wealth levels in the U.S. were higher than in the European regions included in the study. The wealthiest Americans had a lower life expectancy than the wealthiest Europeans, and did not exceed that of the poorest in some European countries such as Germany, France, and the Netherlands.