WHO confirms chronic diseases now surpass other causes: nearly three in four deaths worldwide

The World Health Organization has published the Global Health Estimates, the collection of estimates that reconstructs the evolution of health in countries and regions worldwide from 2000 to 2023. The picture that emerges describes two opposing trends: on one hand a recovery from the damage caused by the pandemic, on the other a long-term acceleration concerning non-communicable diseases.

On the first front, global life expectancy in 2023 reached 73.3 years, a value very close to the 73.4 years recorded in 2019, before the spread of the coronavirus. Healthy life expectancy, however, stopped at 62.8 years, still 0.4 years below the pre-pandemic threshold: a gap that has narrowed but not yet closed, according to data released by the organization.

The figure marking the most pronounced change, however, concerns causes of death. In 2023, non-communicable diseases — cardiovascular conditions, cancers, diabetes, dementias — caused 74% of global deaths, compared with 58% recorded in 2000. Eight of the top ten leading causes of death in the world today are diseases of this type, confirming an epidemiological transition that WHO has observed for some time but which the new figures render more sharply.

Among the fastest-growing items, dementia stands out: Alzheimer’s and other forms of cognitive decline have moved from nineteenth to fifth place in the global ranking of causes of death, with the number of deaths tripling in just over twenty years. The aging of the global population and improved diagnosis are among the factors the estimates associate with this increase, although the report does not break down in detail the relative weight of each cause.

The Global Health Estimates are a summary tool that WHO updates periodically by cross-referencing national health data, mortality registers and statistical models: they therefore remain estimates, not direct censuses, and are subject to revision as individual countries improve the quality of their recording systems.

It should be noted that the news currently comes from a single source (AgenSIR, which reports the WHO report’s data); no independent confirmation of the same figures has been found in another journalistic or institutional source.

The overall result is a snapshot of global health approaching pre-pandemic levels in terms of life span, while coexisting with a growing burden of chronic conditions set, according to the organization, to remain at the center of health policies in the coming decades.