While life expectancy has generally been going up in the U.S., it's declining in some regions of the U.S., according to a new study published in PLoS Medicine. While life expectancy rose by seven years among men and six years among women from 1961 to 1999, 19 percent of women and 4 percent of men in the U.S. saw no change or a drop in life expectancy, with those people clustered largely in the Deep South, along the Mississippi river and in Appalachia. Article