Prestigious medical journals rejected stunning study on deaths among middle-aged whites

A startling new study that shows a big spike in the death rate for a large group of middle-aged whites in the United States was rejected by two prestigious medical journals, the study's co-author, Nobel laureate Angus Deaton, said Tuesday. Deaton and Anne Case, both Princeton economists, received international media attention for the paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). But before they submitted it there, they tried to get it published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Deaton said.