Cancer now biggest rich-world killer
Heart disease remains leading cause of death worldwide
LONDON, Sept 3, (RTRS): Cancer has overtaken heart disease as the leading cause of death in wealthy countries and could become the world’s biggest killer within just a few decades if current trends persist, researchers said on Tuesday.
Publishing the findings of two large studies in The Lancet medical journal, the scientists said they showed evidence of a new global “epidemiologic transition” between different types of chronic disease.
While cardiovascular disease remains, for now, the leading cause of mortality worldwide among middleaged adults – accounting for 40% of all deaths – that is no longer the case in high-income countries, where cancer now kills twice as many people as heart disease, the findings showed.
Common
“Our report found cancer to be the second most common cause of death globally in 2017, accounting for 26% of all deaths. But as (heart disease) rates continue to fall, cancer could likely become the leading cause of death worldwide, within just a few decades,” said Gilles Dagenais, a professor at Quebec’s Laval University in Canada who co-led the work.
Of an estimated 55 million deaths in the world in 2017, the researchers said, around 17·7 million were due to cardiovascular disease – a group of conditions that includes heart failure, angina, heart attack and stroke.
Around 70% of all cardiovascular cases and deaths are due to modifiable risks such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diet, smoking and other lifestyle factors.
In high-income countries, common treatment with cholesterol-lowering statins and blood-pressure medicines have helped bring rates of heart disease down dramatically in the past few decades.
Dagenais’ team said their findings suggest that the higher rates of heartdisease deaths in low-income countries may be mainly due to a lower quality of healthcare.
The research found first hospitalisation rates and heart disease medication use were both substantially lower in poorer and middle-income countries than in wealthy ones.
The research was part of the Prospective Urban and Rural Epidemiologic (PURE) study, published in The Lancet and presented at the ESC Congress in Paris.
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NEW YORK: Over the past decade, the number of children and teens in the US diagnosed with tuberculosis has decreased by nearly half, according to a new study.
But that good news doesn’t apply to everyone. The incidence of the disease among certain racial and ethnic groups was at least 14 times higher than among non-Hispanic white children and adolescents, researchers report in The Lancet Public Health.
“There are effective interventions to prevent children and adolescents from developing TB, such as finding, evaluating and treating those who have been in close contact with someone who has TB disease, and providing TB testing for those at high risk for TB infection or disease,” said the study’s lead author, Tori Cowger, a PhD student in population health sciences at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston.
“To address the disproportionately high TB incidence rates that we observed among some socioeconomic groups of children and adolescents, it will be important to implement these proven interventions, and possibly to consider new approaches to reduce the disparities in TB incidence and mortality in these age groups,” Cowger said in an email.