WHO: global life expectancy returns to 73.3 years, but dementia and mental disorders on the rise

The World Health Organization has published the new Global Health Estimates, the report that measures mortality and disease burden trends worldwide from 2000 to 2023. This is a twenty-three-year historical series, built to track the evolution of global health over a long time span, not a clinical study on a single population sample.

The first finding concerns life expectancy: in 2023 it rose back to 73.3 years globally, returning close to pre-pandemic levels. This is a recovery that comes after the years in which the spread of the coronavirus had eroded previous progress.

The second finding concerns the type of diseases that today kill the most people worldwide. Non-communicable diseases — those not caused by infectious agents, such as cardiovascular diseases or cancer — now cause 74% of global deaths, compared with 58% recorded in 2000, and represent eight of the ten leading causes of death worldwide. This is a profound change in the structure of global mortality compared with a quarter of a century ago.

Within this picture, the WHO highlights two trends that weigh particularly heavily: deaths from dementia have tripled compared with 2000, while health losses linked to anxiety and depression are sharply increasing. Alain Labrique, director of the WHO’s Data, Analytics and Delivery for Impact division, commented on the overall picture as follows:

“Living longer is one of public health’s greatest successes” — Alain Labrique, director of the WHO’s Data, Analytics and Delivery for Impact division

The report does not formulate therapeutic recommendations or treatment indications: it limits itself to measuring, on a global scale, the evolution of causes of death and disease burden between 2000 and 2023, over a period that also includes the years of the Covid-19 pandemic.