HEART DISEASE BIGGEST KILLER IN 2020, WHO REVEALS

A new report by the World Health Organization (WHO) quantified what has killed people in 2020 and the top killers are responsible for more than of half of the entire toll, Nancy Cohen reported for ZME Science.

According to WHO’s 2019 Global Health Estimates, non-communicable diseases made up seven of the world’s top ten causes of death. The top killer, however, was ischaemic heart disease, responsible for 16% of the world’s deaths.

“Since 2000, the largest increase in deaths has been for this disease, rising by more than 2 million to 8.9 million deaths in 2019,” the report mentions. Ischemia is defined as a condition in which the blood flow and oxygen are restricted or reduced. The American Heart Association says that cardiac ischemia refers to decreased blood flow and oxygen to the heart muscle.

Overall, the top global causes of death were grouped into three categories: cardiovascular (ischaemic heart disease, stroke), respiratory (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, lower respiratory infections), and neonatal conditions like birth asphyxia and birth trauma, neonatal sepsis and infections, and preterm birth complications.

The WHO report further looked at diseases vis-a-vis income levels. In high-income countries, deaths due to Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias were on the rise, surpassing stroke as the second leading cause.

In upper-middle-income countries, deaths from lung cancer rose and “stomach cancer featured highly in upper-middle-income countries compared to the other income groups, remaining the only group with this disease in the top 10 causes of death.”

Communicable diseases, meanwhile, showed troubling numbers in low-income countries. Six of the top 10 causes of death in low-income countries were communicable diseases.

“People living in a low-income country are far more likely to die of a communicable disease than a non-communicable disease,” said the WHO report. This is also perhaps why so many developed countries found it difficult to deal with the pandemic — they were not used to dealing with infectious diseases recently.

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