WHO notes that this century has a higher number of deaths from diabetes
Geneva.- The COVID-19 pandemic caused a two-year drop in global life expectancy, from 73.4 years in 2019 to 71.4 in 2021, but the indicator has recovered following the health crisis and now stands at 73.3 years, according to statistics published today by the World Health Organization (WHO).
The report, which includes data up to 2023, also indicates that healthy life expectancy (the time a person can expect to live in good health) has also recovered but more slowly and stands at 62.8 years, compared to 63.2 in 2019.
Leading causes of death
On the other hand, COVID-19, which in the WHO report for 2021 was ranked as the second leading cause of death in the world, is no longer in the “top ten” compiled by the health agency, which continues to be led by cardiovascular diseases, with about 9.5 million deaths annually.
In second place are strokes (about 7 million deaths each year), chronic lung diseases (nearly 4 million), and lower respiratory tract infections (approximately 3 million deaths).
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Completing the ranking are Alzheimer’s and other dementias, diabetes, respiratory tract cancers (trachea, bronchus, lung), hypertensive heart disease, kidney diseases, and diarrheal diseases.
Along with COVID-19, tuberculosis also drops off the list of the top 10 causes of death, where it was in 2021.
Except for diarrheal diseases and respiratory infections, all leading causes of death in 2023 were non-communicable diseases, which continue to progress against communicable ones: according to the WHO, they now account for 74% of global deaths, compared to 58% at the turn of the century.
That epidemiological transition is slower in developing regions, but it is also occurring there according to WHO statistics, which indicate that in 2023, for the first time, more people died from non-communicable diseases than from infectious ones in low-income countries.
Increase in diabetes deaths
The WHO warns of the rapid progression observed in this century in the number of deaths from diabetes (especially in regions such as South Asia).
Deaths from Alzheimer’s and other dementias are also increasing, having gone from being the nineteenth leading cause of death in the year 2000 to the fifth, as the number of deaths has tripled in the quarter-century that has passed.
