Memphis, Jackson among cities with worst life expectancy, report finds

(NEXSTAR) – Where you live has a big impact on how long you live, a recent analysis of major U.S. metro areas finds.

While people born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, can expect to live around 83 years on average, natives of Jackson, Mississippi, have lives that are 8.6 years shorter, according to a MoneyGeek report.

Residents in Memphis are sixth-worst on the list, with a life expectancy of 75.5 years. That’s tied with our neighbors in Knoxville. Several Alabama and Arkansas cities also are among the worst performers.

The report analyzed 119 metro areas with populations of 250,000 or more using data from the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute’s county health rankings. Researchers found the coastal lifestyle appears to be good for longevity: 6 of the top 10 metros for life expectancy are in California or Florida.

This study isn’t the first to connect location with longevity. Researchers at Stanford and MIT found that moving to the Northeast, California and parts of Florida even after age 65 could grow people’s remaining life expectancy by as much as 5 percent.

Researchers found “the areas with the least favorable effects on life expectancy are concentrated in the deep South and Southwest.”

Those results are echoed in MoneyGeek’s analysis, where the bulk of metro areas with lowest life expectancies are in southern states.

See the 25 metro areas with the lowest life expectancies in the chart below. The age refers to the average life expectancy at birth for people born in the metro area.

Meanwhile, the cities with the best life expectancies were:

1. Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk, CT
2. San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley, CA
3. Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA
4. New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ-PA
5. Urban Honolulu, HI

See the full ranking of all 120 metro areas analyzed here.