Summary form only given. Room-temperature continuous-wave operation of II-VI blue-green laser diodes has been possible with a lifetime exceeding an hour. Some major problems limiting a long life-time for II-VI blue-green lasers are a high pre-existing defect density and the growth of defect density during laser operation. Recently, we proposed a theoretical model with an analytical solution for the degradation mechanism of II-VI LEDs based on the carrier-recombination-enhanced defect generation. In this paper we compare this model with experimental results on a CdZnSe LED.