This major shift in causes of death towards NCDs represents the so-called Epidemiological Transition which marks the transition from infectious diseases towards more chronic conditions. The majority of deaths in high-income countries therefore relate to to so-called ‘lifestyle diseases’, including NCDs, kidney, liver, and digestive diseases, or those which typically occur in older age (such as Alzheimer’s and other dementias). This is a common pattern across high-income countries: prosperity, high living standards, good healthcare systems (although there are large inequalities in healthcare access in the US when compared with other rich countries) have seen a successful decline in largely preventable mortality risks.
What do people in the United States die from? In the chart below we see its breakdown of deaths in 2017.Ĭompared with the global data, a larger share of deaths is caused by non-communicable diseases (NCDs) - accounting for almost 90 percent of mortality - and much lower occurrence of preventable deaths such as diarrheal disease, undernutrition, and neonatal deaths.
We cover discussion and analysis on this topic in a blog post here. This can make the annual comparison of deaths between health-related factors and volatile events more challenging and assessing the relative risk of these events can require a longer-term overview of high and low-mortality years. Natural disaster and terrorism-related deaths are different: they can vary substantially from one year to the next. Whilst the relative risk from such events is typically low, we must take care when using annual statistics in this case. Death rates related to disease, illness and other health factors tend to change relatively slowly over time. At least, of all the people in the world, you are most likely to be killed by yourself”.Īt the bottom of the list we see deaths from natural disasters and terrorist attacks. As Yuval Noah Harari notes in his TED Dialogue: “Statistically you are your own worst enemy.
In fact, the number of deaths from suicides is higher than the number of deaths from all forms of violence – including homicide, terrorism, conflict, and executions – globally and across many countries across the world. Surprising to some is that the number who die from suicide is more than double that of homicide at a global level. Road incidents fall within the top causes of death, claiming 1.2 million in 2017. Malaria has been successfully eliminated in some regions, and should with time be possible to eradicate nonetheless, the IHME’s Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study estimates that around 620,000 still died from malaria in 2017. Similarly, diarrheal diseases - which claimed 1.6 million people in 2017 and is one of the leading causes of death in children under 5 years old - are also preventable and treatable through improved water, sanitation, hygiene, and simple ‘oral rehydration salt’ (ORS) packets.
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The very low neonatal death rates in high-income countries and significant progress across the world in recent decades is testament to the fact that we know how to reduce such tragedies significantly. Approximately 1.8 million newborns still died due to complications at birth. There are a number of causes with high death tolls which if not entirely preventable can be (and have been in many countries) dramatically reduced. Cardiovascular diseases were responsible for around one-third of all deaths.Ĭancers (given as the sum of all cancer types - you can find the breakdown here) were the second largest, claiming around 17%, or every sixth death, globally.Ĭollectively, non-communicable diseases (NCDs): together they accounted for more than 41 million deaths (more than 73%) in 2017. The leading global killer in 2017 were cardiovascular diseases (CVD), which refer to a range of diseases that affect the heart and blood vessels: These include hypertension (high blood pressure) coronary heart disease (heart attack) cerebrovascular disease (stroke) heart failure and other heart diseases. You can also the causes of death for any country by clicking on the chart to get to the interactive version of this chart and then chosing ‘Change country’. Note that this list is not exhaustive: deaths from less common causes are not shown. This is shown in absolute numbers, and each cause as a share of total deaths. In the chart below we see a breakdown of global deaths by cause, ordered from highest to lowest.
In 2017, around 56 million people died – nearly half of these were aged 70 years or older 27% aged 50-69 14% aged 15-49 only 1% aged 5-14 and around 10% were children under the age of 5.