Smoking, High Blood Pressure and Overweight Top 3 Preventable Causes of Mortality
28 April 2009
According to the most comprehensive study yet to look at how diet, lifestyle and metabolic risk factors for chronic disease contribute to mortality in the U.S., smoking, high blood pressure and being overweight are the leading preventable risk factors for premature mortality in the United States. The researchers found that smoking is responsible for 467,000 premature mortalities each year, high blood pressure for 395,000, and being overweight for 216,000. Smoking and high blood pressure are responsible for the greatest number of preventable mortalities. The effects of smoking work out to be about one in five mortalities in American adults, while high blood pressure is responsible for one in six mortalities.
"The large magnitude of the numbers for many of these risks made us pause," said Goodarz Danaei, lead author of the study. "To have hundreds of thousands of premature mortalities 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."
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:
- Smoking: 467,000
- High blood pressure: 395,000
- Overweight-obesity: 216,000
- 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 (alcohol use averted a balance of 26,000 deaths from heart disease, stroke and diabetes, because moderate drinking reduces risk of these diseases. But these deaths were outweighed by 90,000 alcohol-related deaths from traffic and other injuries, violence, cancers and a range of other diseases).
- Low intake of fruits and vegetables: 58,000
- Low dietary poly-unsaturated fatty acids: 15,000
All of the mortalities 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 lifestyle changes, public health and health system interventions.
The authors stress that there are interventions at an individual and a population level that are already shown to be effective at combating the two deadliest risk factors - smoking and high blood pressure. Yet despite knowledge of these interventions, the reduction of blood pressure and tobacco smoking has stagnated and even reversed in some areas.
While earlier studies had quantified mortalities linked to a few factors, like smoking and alcohol, this is the first to look at a wide range of risk factors, including those linked to diet, lifestyle and metabolic factors, and the first to do so for the whole U.S. population. This is also the first to use methods that allowed a true comparison of a diverse set of risks in terms of how many mortalities each of the risk factors is responsible for. The researchers analyzed data from a number of public sources, including from the National Center for Health Statistics and numerous published epidemiological studies and clinical trials.
Differences were also found between the preventable causes of mortality among men and women. High blood pressure was the leading cause of mortality in adult women, killing nearly 230,000 American women each year, 19 percent of all female mortalities. By comparison, that is more than five times the 42,000 number of annual mortalities in women from breast cancer.
Smoking was the leading cause of mortality in men, killing an estimated 248,000 annually, or 21 percent of all adult male mortalities.
The mortality effects of many other risk factors were about equal in men and women, with alcohol use being a major exception. Seventy percent of all mortalities caused by alcohol were among men and represented 45,000 mortalities, a result the researchers said was because men consumed more alcohol and engaged in more binge drinking.
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References:
1. Goodarz Danaei, Eric L. Ding, Dariush Mozaffarian, Ben Taylor, Jurgen Rehm, Christopher J.L. Murray, Majid Ezzati. The Preventable Causes of Death in the United States: Comparative Risk Assessment of Dietary, Lifestyle, and Metabolic Risk Factors,"PLoS Medicine, April 28, 2009, Volume 6, Issue 4.
2. Image by Philter137.
The authors stress that there are interventions at an individual and a population level that are already shown to be effective at combating the two deadliest risk factors - smoking and high blood pressure. Yet despite knowledge of these interventions, the reduction of blood pressure and tobacco smoking has stagnated and even reversed in some areas.
While earlier studies had quantified mortalities linked to a few factors, like smoking and alcohol, this is the first to look at a wide range of risk factors, including those linked to diet, lifestyle and metabolic factors, and the first to do so for the whole U.S. population. This is also the first to use methods that allowed a true comparison of a diverse set of risks in terms of how many mortalities each of the risk factors is responsible for. The researchers analyzed data from a number of public sources, including from the National Center for Health Statistics and numerous published epidemiological studies and clinical trials.
Differences were also found between the preventable causes of mortality among men and women. High blood pressure was the leading cause of mortality in adult women, killing nearly 230,000 American women each year, 19 percent of all female mortalities. By comparison, that is more than five times the 42,000 number of annual mortalities in women from breast cancer.
Smoking was the leading cause of mortality in men, killing an estimated 248,000 annually, or 21 percent of all adult male mortalities.
The mortality effects of many other risk factors were about equal in men and women, with alcohol use being a major exception. Seventy percent of all mortalities caused by alcohol were among men and represented 45,000 mortalities, a result the researchers said was because men consumed more alcohol and engaged in more binge drinking.
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References:
1. Goodarz Danaei, Eric L. Ding, Dariush Mozaffarian, Ben Taylor, Jurgen Rehm, Christopher J.L. Murray, Majid Ezzati. The Preventable Causes of Death in the United States: Comparative Risk Assessment of Dietary, Lifestyle, and Metabolic Risk Factors,"PLoS Medicine, April 28, 2009, Volume 6, Issue 4.
2. Image by Philter137.
