A massive global health check suggests people are living more years with illness and disability. 

The new Global Burden of Disease (GBD 2015) study - a frequently-updated analysis of the world’s health – looks at the drivers of ill health, disability, and death in individual countries.

Key points from the latest edition include;

  • Life expectancy has risen, but 7 out of 10 deaths now due to non-communicable diseases
  • Headaches, tooth cavities, and hearing and vision loss each affect more than 1 in 10 people
  • Progress has been made on reducing unsafe water and sanitation, but diet, obesity, and drug use are an increasing threat
  • More than 275,000 women died in pregnancy or childbirth in 2015, most from preventable causes
  • Under 5 deaths have halved since 1990, but slower progress on reducing newborn deaths

For the first time, GBD 2015 includes a measure of development (the Socio-Demographic Index, or SDI, which is based on income per capita, educational attainment and total fertility rate) in order to assess a country’s observed performance compared to their expected performance based on their stage of development.

 “Development drives, but does not determine health,” says Dr Christopher Murray, Director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington in Seattle, the coordinating centre for the GBD collaboration.

“We see countries that have improved far faster than can be explained by income, education, or fertility.

“We also continue to see countries – including the United States – that are far less healthy than they should be given their resources.” 

The world population has gained more than a decade of life expectancy since 1980, rising to 69.0 years in men and 74.8 years in women in 2015. An important contributor to this has been large falls in death rates for many communicable diseases particularly in the last 10 years, including HIV/AIDS, malaria, and diarrhoea.

The rate of people dying from cardiovascular disease and cancers has also fallen, although at a slower pace.

The number of annual deaths has increased from roughly 48 million in 1990 to almost 56 million in 2015.

Seventy per cent (40 million) of global deaths in 2015 were due to non-communicable diseases (NCDs including ischaemic heart disease, stroke, diabetes, chronic kidney disease, Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, and drug use disorders).

In 2015, an estimated 1.2 million deaths were due to HIV/AIDS (down 33.5 per cent since 2005), and 730500 were due to malaria (down 37 per cent since 2005).