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lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
Among high-income countries, US shows slowest progress in reducing risk
of chronic disease deaths, new study finds
By Jacqueline Howard, CNN
Updated:
6:32 PM EDT, Wed September 10, 2025
Source: CNN
Among all high-income Western countries, the United States has shown
the worst performance in reducing the probability of dying from chronic
diseases, a new study finds.
From 2010 to 2019, deaths due to chronic diseases declined in most age
groups in the US but increased among adults 20 to 45, “a rare
phenomenon in high-income western countries,” according to the study,
published Wednesday in the journal .
The study, led by researchers at Imperial College London, analyzed data
on 185 countries and territories and found that, from 2010 to 2019, the
probability of dying by age 80 from a noncommunicable disease — such
as cancer, heart disease and stroke — declined in most of those
countries, but the decline had slowed compared with the previous
decade.
“The risk of dying – or what we call probability in the paper –
from chronic diseases in most countries in the world is coming down,”
said Majid Ezzati, the study’s senior author and a professor in the
School of Public Health at Imperial College London and Imperial Global
Ghana.
“But we were doing better before,” he said.
Among the 25 high-income Western countries in the study, Denmark had
the largest decline in chronic disease deaths, while the United States
had the smallest, and Germany did only slightly better than the United
States.
“The US is the slowest, but it’s by no means the exception,”
Ezzati said. “Germany is doing nearly as badly.”
Among the high-income Western countries, there were small to moderate
declines in the probability of dying from a chronic disease by age 80
from 2010 to 2019 overall. But the researchers noted that a possible
reason why the declines were not larger as a group is that in many
countries, neuropsychiatric conditions such as dementia increased and
contributed unfavorably to the trends.
The new study included data from the World Health Organization’s ,
and the team of researchers analyzed deaths between time periods,
countries and by age groups: young adults 20 to 45, working-age adults
45 to 65, and older adults 65 to 80.
The data showed that from 2010 to 2019, chronic disease deaths declined
in about 80% of the world’s countries, home to more than 70% of the
global population.
The reasons for widespread decline in chronic disease mortality could
be tied to improvements in diagnosing and treating chronic diseases,
according to the study. For instance, there have been changes in
clinical guidelines as well as increases in the use of certain
medications and the early detection of certain cancers.
But in about 60% of countries, either the decline in chronic disease
deaths from 2010 to 2019 was smaller than it had been in the preceding
decade or there was a reversal of an earlier decline, the data showed.
“The countries that did really well did well both in older and
working ages. Countries that did really badly did badly in both older
and working ages,” Ezzati said. “And then there was some tradeoff
between these. Some places never slowed down in older ages, but they
have in working ages, and vice versa.”
From 2010 to 2019, Finland, Norway and Denmark all had a slower decline
in chronic disease deaths among older ages than they had in the
previous decade. But they still maintained significant progress in
reducing the risk of chronic disease deaths overall because that slower
decline among older adults was countered by faster declines among
working-age adults.
In the United States, small reductions in mortality among older adults
were combined with a stagnation among working-age adults and increases
in mortality among young adults, leading to the nation’s poor
performance compared with other high-income Western countries.
The study did not analyze why some countries had greater improvements
than others in reducing the probability of chronic disease deaths, but
Ezzati had some ideas.
In both high-income Western countries that performed poorly compared
with their peers – the United States and Germany – there are
segments of the population in which there has been less investment in
public health, he noted, and these disparities in investment can lead
to broad barriers to accessing care.
For instance, a barrier can be not having a primary care physician in
your local area, which can lead to the delayed screening for and
diagnosis of chronic conditions, Ezzati said.
Many Americans live in areas where critical-care services are lacking.
It’s estimated that . And a CNN analysis has found that people living
in 16% of the mainland United States are 30 miles or more from the
nearest hospital.
The United States also has had a rise in the probability of dying from
neuropsychiatric conditions, such as dementia and alcohol use
disorders, which did not appear to offset continued declines in deaths
from cancers and cardiovascular diseases – and these trends could
have contributed to the nation’s poor performance in reducing chronic
disease mortality, according to the researchers.
The new study was published a day after the Trump administration
released the ’s action plan on reducing in the United States.
US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made
tackling chronic diseases a primary focus. In an , Kennedy noted that
the share of , according to data from the US Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention.
Elena Ladas, a professor of global integrative medicine at Columbia
University and an expert on noncommunicable diseases in young people,
said she is optimistic the United States is heading toward embracing
wellness as a prevention tool to reduce chronic disease deaths, but she
wants to see a clear implementation plan.
“They’re talking about the right things: Ultraprocessed foods need
to really be minimized, and exposures to pesticides and environmental
contaminants,” Ladas said of the MAHA report. “They’re talking
about what I think a lot of epidemiologists and clinicians have been
saying for a very long time. But how they’re going to implement that
remains to be seen.”
Ladas, who was not involved in the new study but has done public health
work in nearly two dozen countries, said the United States should
“think about wellness comprehensively” to reduce the burden of
chronic disease.
“Wellness approaches include good nutrition. We need to make healthy
food reasonably priced. A lot of times, farmer’s markets are more
expensive than the grocery store. You don’t see that in Europe. In
Europe, farmer’s markets are far less expensive than grocery
stores,” Ladas said.
“And mental health can include meditation and deep-breathing,” she
added. “There are more holistic wellness approaches to include for a
lot of these chronic conditions versus being only medication-based
resolutions. You need both.”
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