What did the world’s health look at the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic? The new Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) 2019, led by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) and published in The Lancet, provides a critical snapshot of how the ongoing crisis of chronic diseases and worsening risk factors left populations across the world deeply vulnerable to COVID-19.
This year’s studies illuminate how rises in preventable risk factors—for example, high blood pressure and high blood sugar—threaten hard-fought gains in life expectancy across the globe. Several of the chronic diseases related to these risk factors, like diabetes and cardiovascular disease, are related to risk of serious illness and death from COVID-19. Social inequalities, note the authors, only exacerbate these health effects further. Global progress on health remains uneven: Though low and middle-income countries made great strides through dramatic reductions in infectious, maternal, and neonatal diseases, improvements in health continue to stagnate in higher-income countries like the U.S.
The Global Burden of Disease (GBD) studies form the largest ever systematic effort to describe the distribution and causes of a wide array of major diseases, injuries, and health risk factors by examining data across populations worldwide from 1990 to the present. The main findings are disseminated through five papers, covering population and fertility; universal health coverage and health systems; diseases and injuries; risk factors; and demographics. The IHME also maintains a resource portal for the GBD studies including summary reports, additional visualizations, and data sets quantifying health loss from hundreds of diseases, injuries, and risk factors, so that health systems can be improved and disparities eliminated. All GBD articles are available to the public free of charge.
To understand the full ramifications of the 2019 findings, explore the full series on The Lancet, as well as our resource packs on the Global Burden of Disease Studies: Global Burden of Disease Study: General Resources; Global Burden of Disease Study: Topics; and Global Burden of Disease Study: Regional and Subnational Analysis.