What kills us?

Heart disease, Alzheimer’s and strokes are the biggest killers in the UK - but how do we compare to the rest of the world?

CARDIOVASCULAR diseases are the biggest killer worldwide - but in the UK you are more likely to die from cancer.

Cancers were responsible for almost a third of deaths in the UK in 2017 - the latest year for which global data is available.

Some 30% of Brits who died that year (179,856 people), died from the disease, compared to 17% of deaths globally.

Cancers were followed in the UK by cardiovascular diseases (29%) and neurological disorders (13%).

When looking at specific diseases, ischemic heart disease was the UK’s biggest killer - causing one in every seven deaths (14%).

Also known as coronary heart disease, these are problems caused by narrowed arteries, which means less blood and oxygen reaches the heart.

That was followed by Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias - with roughly one in every 10 people who died that year succumbing to the condition (11%).

Across the world, cardiovascular diseases are by far the biggest killer.

Some 17,790,949 people were killed by a cardiovascular disease in 2017 - 32% of all deaths.

After cancers, which caused 17% of deaths worldwide, the biggest killers were chronic respiratory diseases (7%) and respiratory infections and tuberculosis (7%).

Meanwhile, people who died in the UK were twice as likely to die of a neurological disorder,suchasAltzeimersorParkinson’s, than the global average.

Those disorders caused 13% of all UK deaths, but only 6% of global deaths in 2017.

Despite making headlines, injuries, selfharm, road accidents and other violent deaths are only responsible for 3% of all fatalities in the UK.

Globally, that figure is more than twice as high - making up 8% of all deaths.

The most likely violent death in the UK is from falling over - it overtook self harm as the most common type of death in 2003, and has sharply risen since, with 7,781 people killed by falls in 2017.

Self harm is now the second most common type of violent death in the UK. Some 5,778 people died from it in 2017.

A big UK success story is the decline in road related deaths in recent years.

In 1990, a massive 5,837 people were killed on the roads.

That has fallen pretty much every year since, reaching a low of 2,614 in 2015 though the number has risen slightly since.

The number of shootings has also trended downwards, from 95 in 1990 to 39 in 2017.

Globally, road injuries are the most common cause of violent death, followed by self-harm, and then falls.