A NEW GLOBAL study of disease shows that people are living an average of 10 years longer – but we spend more time overall living with injury and illness.
The Lancet has published the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010 (GBD 2010), the largest ever systematic effort since 1990to describe the global distribution and causes of a wide array of major diseases, injuries, and health risk factors.
The results show that infectious diseases, maternal and child illness, and malnutrition now cause fewer deaths and less illness than they did 20 years ago. Fewer children are dying every year, but more young- and middle-aged adults are dying and suffering from disease and injury, as diseases such as cancer and heart disease become the main causes of death and disability worldwide.
The study took more than five years and involved 486 authors in 50 different countries. GBD 2010 is being published in a special issue of The Lancet, the first time that the journal has dedicated an entire issue to a single study.
Findings
Life expectancy
The study shows that the world’s population has gained more than a decade’s life expectancy since 1970, but the gap between the countries with the highest and lowest life expectancies has hardly changed.
Deaths in children under five years old have declined by almost 60 per cent since 1970, from 16.4 million deaths in 1970 to 6.8 million in 2010.
Japanese women had the highest life expectancy at birth in the world, at 85.09, while Iceland had the highest life expectancy for men, at 80 years.
Haiti had the lowest life expectancy at birth: 32.5 for men and 43.6 for women. Overall, men’s life expectancy in Southern sub-Saharan Africa decreased by 1.3 years between 1970 and 2010, and women’s life expectancy decreased by 0.9 years in the same period, with the decline attributed to the catastrophic HIV / AIDS epidemic.
Belarus and Ukraine in Eastern Europe also underwent notable declines in life expectancy, thought to be due to high rates of alcohol-related deaths.
Illness
The authors measured the years lived with disability (YLD) for people. Lower back pain, depression, irondeficiency anaemia, and neck pain were the top four sequelae responsible for the greatest overall health loss (measured in terms of YLDs) in both 1990 and 2010.
In 2010, the two disease categories responsible for almost half of all YLDs were musculoskeletal disorders (such as arthritis and back pain), and mental and behavioural disorders (such as depression, schizophrenia, and drug and alcohol use disorders).
The number of years that people could expect to live in good health at birth only increased by 3.9 years for men and 4.0 years for women in the same period, suggesting that the world’s population loses more years of healthy life to disability today than it did 20 years ago.
The problem is even more pronounced by the age of 50, with life expectancy having increased by more than 2 years in men, and 2.5 years in women since 1990, but with healthy life expectancy increasing by around 1.5 years for both sexes during the same period.
Overall, women can expect to live for more years in better health, with women in four countries (Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Spain) having a healthy life expectancy greater than 70 years in 2010; there were no countries where this was the case for men, and in only three countries (Afghanistan, Jordan, and Mali) was men’s healthy life expectancy greater than women’.
The study showed that acute schizophrenia and severe MS were judged by the general public to be the most serious health problems.
Deaths from HIV and malaria remain high. Diseases such as cancer, diabetes and heart disease, accounted for nearly two out of every three deaths worldwide, compared to one in two of all deaths in 1990. Thirty eight per cent more people died of cancer in 2010 compared to 1990.
Heart disease and stroke collectively caused around in four deaths worldwide in 2010, compared to one in five in 1990.
Smoking and alcohol
The study shows that high blood pressure, smoking and alcohol present the largest risks to health worldwide. One in four deaths worldwide is caused by heart disease or stroke.
High blood pressure was estimated to be responsible for 9.4 million deaths, tobacco smoking (including second-hand smoke), responsible for 6.3 million deaths, with alcohol use responsible for 5 million.
Dietary factors and physical inactivity were responsible for 12.5 million deaths, with the most prominent dietary risks found to be diets low in fruit and diets high in sodium.
Even though the risk factors have undergone dramatic changes since 1990, one factor which has barely changed was smoking.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say