Preventable causes of death are causes of death related to risk factors which could have been avoided. The World Health Organization has traditionally classified death according to the primary type of disease or injury. However, causes of death may also be classified in terms of preventable risk factorsâÂÂsuch as smoking, unhealthy diet, unprotected sexual behavior (STIs), and reckless drivingâÂÂwhich contribute to a number of different diseases. Such risk factors are usually not recorded directly on death certificates, although they are acknowledged in medical reports.
It is estimated that of the roughly 150,000 people who die each day across the globe, about two thirdsâÂÂ100,000 per dayâÂÂdie of age-related causes. In industrialized nations the proportion is much higher, reaching 90 percent. Thus, albeit indirectly, biological aging (senescence) is by far the leading cause of death. Whether senescence as a biological process itself can be slowed, halted, or even reversed is a subject of current scientific speculation and research.
Risk factors associated with the leading causes of preventable death worldwide as of the year 2001, according to researchers working with the Disease Control Priorities Network (DCPN):
By contrast, the World Health Organization (WHO)'s 2008 statistics list only causes of death, and not the underlying risk factors.
In 2001, on average 29,000 children died of preventable causes each day (that is, about 20 deaths per minute). The authors provide the context:
In 2017, The Lancet published a large study by Swiss epidemiologist Silvia Stringhini and her collaborators, analysing the impact of the most important causes of preventable death in Western societies. They estimated the number of years of life lost for each risk factor at the individual level and its contribution to preventable death at the societal level (PAF = Population Attributable Fraction).
The multicohort study and meta-analysis used individual-level data from 48 independent prospective cohort studies with information on socioeconomic status, high alcohol consumption, physical inactivity, current smoking, hypertension, diabetes and obesity, and mortality, for a total population of 1,751,479 from seven high-income WHO member countries.
A limitation of many studies of health risk factors is confounding bias: many risk factors are interrelated and cluster together in high-risk populations. For example, low physical activity and obesity go hand in hand. People who are physically inactive tend to gain weight, and people who are severely obese have difficulty exercising. The unique advantage of the huge amount of individual data in the Stringhini study is that it allows (estimation of) the relative contribution of each separate risk factor.
The following table shows that, at an individual level, smoking is the single greatest risk of avoidable death, followed by diabetes and high alcohol consumption. At the population level, diabetes and high alcohol consumption have a low prevalence. Physical inactivity, smoking and low socioeconomic status (SES) are then the top three preventable causes of early death. Smoking, physical inactivity and low SES account for almost two thirds of all avoidable deaths.
A puzzling finding is the small contribution of obesity as a cause of avoidable premature death. There are two reasons why obesity is not an important independent risk factor, as is often assumed.
The three risk factors most commonly leading to preventable death in the population of the United States are smoking, high blood pressure, and being overweight. Pollution from fossil fuel burning kills roughly 200,000 per year.https://academic.oup.com/cardiovascres/article/116/11/1910/5770885
Various injuries are the leading cause of death in children 9âÂÂ17 years of age. In 2008, the top five worldwide unintentional injuries in children were as follows: