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Diseases that affect the nervous system, such as stroke, migraines and dementia, have overtaken heart disease to become the leading cause of poor health around the world, a major new analysis showed on Friday. .
More than 3.4 billion people (43 percent of the world’s population) experienced a neurological condition in 2021, far more than previously thought. the analysis found.
The study was carried out by hundreds of researchers led by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), based in the United States, which has become a global reference in health statistics.
The study’s lead author, Jaimie Steinmetz of IHME, said the results showed that nervous system conditions are now “the leading global cause of overall disease burden.”
Cases of these conditions have skyrocketed by 59 percent in the past three decades, he said, and the increase is mainly due to the fact that the world’s population is aging and growing rapidly.
Researchers looked at how 37 different neurological conditions affected poor health, disability and premature death in 204 countries and territories between 1990 and 2021.
These data were used to estimate how many years of healthy life were lost due to each condition, called disability-adjusted life years (DALYs).
More than 443 million years of healthy life were lost due to nervous system disorders worldwide in 2021, an 18 percent increase from 1990, the study found.
However, if age and increasing population size were adjusted for, DALYs and deaths from these conditions actually fell by about a third, the researchers said.
Stroke, previously counted as a heart disease, was by far the worst neurological condition analyzed and accounted for 160 million years of healthy life lost.
It was followed by a form of brain damage called neonatal encephalopathy, migraine, dementia including Alzheimer’s disease, nerve damage from diabetes, meningitis and epilepsy.
Cognitive impairment due to Covid-19 ranked 20th.
The main reason nervous system diseases surpassed cardiovascular diseases in the latest analysis was a recent World Health Organization classification change that moved stroke into the neurological category, Steinmetz told AFP.
The huge number of years of health lost from these conditions is partly because several of them can kill children under five, and such birth trauma causes neonatal encephalopathy, asphyxia or meningitis, he said.
“Because deaths occur at a young age, this makes a large contribution to years of life lost,” he added.
Children accounted for nearly a fifth of all healthy years lost, the study found.
‘Growing very quickly’
More than 11 million people died from the 37 neurological conditions in 2021, according to the study in the journal The Lancet Neurology.
However, cardiovascular diseases remained the leading cause of death, killing 19.8 million people worldwide in 2022, the IHME said last year.
The most common neurological disorders were tension headaches and migraines.
The fastest growing condition was nerve damage called diabetic neuropathy due to increasing cases of diabetes.
Most of these conditions have no cure.
But there are ways to reduce the risk, including reducing rates of high blood pressure, diabetes and alcohol consumption, the researchers said.
They called for much more to be done to prevent, treat and rehabilitate these disorders that disproportionately affect poorer countries.
“The global neurological burden is growing very rapidly and will put even more pressure on health systems in the coming decades,” warned study co-author Valery Feigin.
© Agence France-Presse