The latest findings from the Global Burden of Disease Study (GBD) were published this month in The Lancet, providing new insights on how well countries were prepared in terms of underlying health for the COVID-19 pandemic, and setting out the true scale of the challenge to protect against further pandemic threats.
The study – the work of more than 5647 collaborators, including several UNSW academics – also reveals that the rise in exposure to key risk factors (including high blood pressure, high blood sugar, high BMI, and elevated cholesterol) combined with rising deaths from cardiovascular disease in some countries, suggests the world might be approaching a turning point in life expectancy gains.
Healthy life expectancy in Australia – the number of years a person can expect to live in good health – has increased steadily over the past three decades to 70.0 years in Australia (a 4.1 year increase from 1990) in 2019, but it has not risen as much as overall life expectancy (82.9, a 5.9 increase from 1990), indicating that people are living more years in poor health.
Co-author Professor Perminder Sachdev, Co-Director, UNSW Sydney Centre for Healthy Brain Ageing (CHeBA), said a significant proportion of the gap between health span and life span was due to brain diseases, in particular dementia. “It is interesting that the most common risk factors identified by the GBD study are also risk factors of dementia and controlling them could offer a lifetime of good health,” he said.
Prof. Mitchell said while universal health coverage was improving worldwide, many health systems had not adapted to the rapid change in the pattern of disease burden from premature death to increased disability.
“There is a growing need for investment in innovative interventions to reduce this growth in the impact of disability,” he said.
Ischaemic heart disease was the leading cause of poor health in Australia and New Zealand in 2019, followed by low back pain, falls, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and depressive disorders.
Over the past 30 years, overall rates of death among 15-49-year-olds declined by 31 per cent in Australia. However, rates of death due to drug use disorders rose substantially in this age group (by 55.2 per cent), as did rates of death due to endocrine, metabolic, blood, and immune disorders (by 75.2 per cent).
