Suicides and drug overdoses were two reasons for an increase in the number of deaths in the United States last year. They also were partly to blame for a continuing decrease in how long Americans are expected to live. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that there were more than 2.8 million deaths nationwide in 2017. That is nearly 70,000 more than in 2016. It was the most deaths in a single year since the U.S. government began counting more than a century ago. The Associated Press says the increase is partly a result of the nation’s growing, aging population. But it is deaths in younger age groups, especially middle-aged people, that have had the biggest effect on life expectancy, experts said. The “statistics are a wake-up call that we are losing too many Americans, too early and too often, to conditions that are preventable,” said CDC Director Robert Redfield.