According to a recent study, men’s and women’s life expectancy in the United States has altered since the COVID-19 epidemic.

The data were published earlier this week in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, which revealed that the life expectancy disparity between men and women has grown to its greatest since 1996, owing to more males dying from COVID-19 and drug overdoses.

According to the report, women had a life expectancy of 79.3 years in 2021, the most recent year for which federal data was available, while males had a life expectancy of 73.5 years.

Overall, the study found that Americans’ life expectancy has fallen steadily since 2019, from 78.8 years in 2019 to 77.0 years in 2020 and 76.1 years in 2021.

Dr. Brandon Yan, a resident physician at the University of California, San Francisco, and the study’s principal author, raised alarm about the findings in a statement to The New York Times.

“It was unsettling to see,” he told the newspaper. “We need to understand which groups are particularly losing out on years of life expectancy, so interventions can be at least partially focused on these groups.”

Dr. Yan also proposed an explanation for the life expectancy disparity between men and women in the United States.

“All of these point to a picture of worsening mental health across the board, but particularly among men,” he told the New York Times.