Preventable causes of death
Published May 7, 2009
While the media fans the flames of mass hysteria over swine flu, which has infected only a small number of people and killed almost none, they routinely ignore the more common, if not widespread, causes of death, many of which are completely, or nearly completely, preventable if only people were educated and motivated enough to make changes to their lifestyles. Imagine if just a fraction of the energy that people are putting into avoiding swine flu were put into efforts to reduce smoking, high blood pressure and obesity, which together are responsible for over one million premature deaths every year. “To have hundreds of thousands of premature deaths caused by these modifiable risk factors is shocking and should motivate a serious look at whether our public health system has sufficient capacity to implement interventions and whether it is currently focusing on the right set of interventions,” said Majid Ezzati, PhD, associate professor of international health at Harvard School of Public Health.
These data come from new research, of which Dr. Ezzati is one author, published in the online journal PLOS Medicine. The researchers found that smoking is responsible for 467,000 premature deaths each year, high blood pressure for 395,000, and being overweight for 216,000. The effects of smoking work out to be about one in five deaths in American adults, while high blood pressure is responsible for one in six deaths. The researchers also found large effects from a series of other preventable dietary and lifestyle risk factors. Below are the numbers of deaths in the U.S. due annually to each of the individual risk factors examined:
High blood pressure: 395,000
Inadequate physical activity and inactivity: 191,000
High blood sugar: 190,000
High LDL cholesterol: 113,000
High dietary salt: 102,000
Low dietary omega-3 fatty acids (seafood): 84,000
High dietary trans fatty acids: 82,000
Alcohol use: 64,000
Low intake of fruits and vegetables: 58,000
Low dietary poly-unsaturated fatty acids: 15,000
All of the deaths calculated in the study were considered premature or preventable in that the victims would not have died when they did if they had not been subject to the behaviors or activities linked to their deaths. All of these risk factors are modifiable through a range of public health and health system interventions.
The researchers also found differences between the preventable causes of death among men and women. High blood pressure was the leading cause of death in adult women, killing nearly 230,000 American women each year, 19 percent of all female deaths. By comparison, that is more than five times the 42,000 number of annual deaths in women from breast cancer. Smoking was the leading cause of death in men, killing an estimated 248,000 annually, or 21 percent of all adult male deaths.
If you smoke, stop. If you have high blood pressure, get it treated (and if you don’t know your blood pressure, get it tested). Overweight? Eat a little less and exercise a little more. All the rest of the risk factors on the list are also modifiable, primarily through proper diet and exercise. Some may require medication: high blood pressure, diabetes, and high cholesterol for example (they could be controlled by diet and exercise alone, but few people are prepared to do what it takes). Eat less salt, less fat, less meat (especially processed meats) and less refined sugar and eat more fresh fruits and vegetables and whole grains. The odds are astronomically higher that one of these preventable problems will kill you prematurely than they are that swine flu, seasonal flu or any other type of infection will. If the media screamed this at us every night, perhaps then we’d listen.
This piece was adapted in part from materials provided by the Harvard School of Public Health – http://www.hsph.harvard.edu