If you’re wondering what health and disease might look like in 30 years time – what conditions might be dominating and how that will affect our lives – then wonder no more. According to the latest findings from the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD), the landscape will look quite different by 2050, with an increase in life expectancy and a switch toward non-communicable diseases like heart disease and cancer.
The GBD study is the most comprehensive effort to quantify health loss around the globe over time. Since 1991, it has helped us better understand the changing health challenges facing people across the world and informed clinicians, researchers, and policymakers working in the health sphere.
Earlier this year, data from the 2021 edition of the GBD revealed that neurological conditions had overtaken cardiovascular disease as the number one cause of ill health worldwide. Now, The Lancet has published more findings from the 2021 study in a series of six articles.
As you might expect, COVID-19 took center stage: It “has been the largest setback in global health over the past 71 years, as measured by life expectancy”, Professor Christopher Murray, Director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, writes in a viewpoint summarizing the GBD findings. Global life expectancy dropped by 1.6 years between 2019 and 2021, Murray explains, with the greatest decreases seen in Peru, which had a 6.5-year decline.
However, the GBD also highlighted other health trends that have continued as the world has navigated a global pandemic, with articles focusing on fertility, causes of death, disability-adjusted life-years, and risk factors to highlight the complexities of disease burden across the world beyond COVID-19. It has even looked to the future to predict what the disease landscape will look like in coming decades.
“Our Article on forecasts for GBD […] highlights that future trends might be quite different to past trends because of factors such as the obesity epidemic, the increase in substance-use disorders, and climate change, while also underlining the tremendous opportunities to alter the trajectory of health for the next generation,” Murray adds.
The study focused on 204 countries and territories, forecasting “the most likely future” of disease burden up to 2050, as well as alternative scenarios based on certain risk factors being eliminated.
Of course, the researchers didn’t have a crystal ball to tell them what would happen to global health in the next 30-odd years. Instead, they relied on forecasts of major drivers of health, as well as risk factor trajectories – things like climate models and predicted particulate matter pollution (PM2·5) – to inform their predictions.
In the most likely scenario, life expectancy is predicted to increase – by 4.9 years in males and 4.2 years in females – although this rise is slower than in the three decades preceding the COVID-19 pandemic. Increases are expected to be largest in countries where life expectancy is lower.
“Despite the rising burden due to climate change, BMI, high fasting plasma glucose, drug use, and, in some places, PM2·5, we expect life expectancy and healthy life expectancy to increase up to 2050,” Murray writes. However, he cautions that “the expected progress is fragile,” and could easily be derailed by threats such as food insecurity, antimicrobial resistance, nuclear escalation of conflicts, and increases in diabetes, obesity, addiction, and aging.
Forecasts also predicted that “health will improve in the coming decades”, but that there will be a shift in disease burden from communicable, maternal, neonatal, and nutritional diseases (CMNNs) to non-communicable diseases (NCDs) – diseases that are not transmissible directly from one person to another, including cardiovascular disease, cancer, and diabetes.
There will also be an increase in years lived with disability (YLDs), indicating a shift away from premature death and toward morbidity – i.e. people will live for longer but with more years in poorer health.
Meanwhile, geographic discrepancies in life expectancy are expected to lessen: “While health inequalities between the highest- and lowest-income regions will remain, the gaps are shrinking, with the biggest increases anticipated in sub-Saharan Africa,” Murray said in a statement.
The alternative future scenarios – which involved minimizing environmental risks, risks associated with CMNNs, risks associated with NCDs, and the combined effects of these three scenarios – demonstrated that by eliminating certain risks we can dramatically improve health outcomes in the future, particularly if major NCD risks are addressed.
“There is immense opportunity ahead for us to influence the future of global health by getting ahead of these rising metabolic and dietary risk factors, particularly those related to behavioral and lifestyle factors like high blood sugar, high body mass index, and high blood pressure,” concluded Murray.
The study is published in The Lancet.
Source Link: What Will The Global Disease Landscape Look Like In 2050?
