The life expectancy of Moscow residents in 1990 was ten years below what it had been in 1970. Due to high technology medicine being concentrated in Moscow, an urban center which absorbs high risk patients from other regions, it was nonetheless disturbing to find that the Infant Mortality Rate was two-to-three times higher in Moscow, in 1989, than in other republic capitals, and that congenitally deformed children were being born one and a half times more often on the average than in the country as a whole.