Top 3 Preventable Causes of Death
A study conducted by the Harvard School of Public Health has identified the top 3 preventable causes of death amongst Americans as smoking, high blood pressure and obesity.
Collaborating with the University of Toronto and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, the researchers concluded the most comprehensive study to date looking at the effects of diet and lifestyle as well as metabolic risk factors on the mortality rate in the United States. According to the study’s results, smoking prematurely kills 467 00 Americans each year, high blood pressure 395 000 a year and being overweight 216 000 annually.
“To have hundreds of thousands of premature deaths caused by these modifiable risk factors is shocking and should motivate a serious look at whether our public health system has sufficient capacity to implement interventions and whether it is currently focusing on the right set of interventions,” says Majid Ezzati, the senior author of the study and an associate professor on international health at Harvard School of Public Health, in a statement.
But the researchers didn’t only focus on those 3 risk factors. Below are their full findings of premature deaths in the US due to individual risk factors:
Smoking: 467,000
High blood pressure: 395,000
Overweight-obesity: 216,000
Inadequate physical activity and inactivity: 191,000
High blood sugar: 190,000
High LDL cholesterol: 113,000
High dietary salt: 102,000
Low dietary omega-3 fatty acids (seafood): 84,000
High dietary trans fatty acids: 82,000
Alcohol use: 64,000 (alcohol use averted a balance of 26,000 deaths from heart disease, stroke and diabetes, because moderate drinking reduces risk of these diseases. But these deaths were outweighed by 90,000 alcohol-related deaths from traffic and other injuries, violence, cancers and a range of other diseases).
Low intake of fruits and vegetables: 58,000
Low dietary poly-unsaturated fatty acids: 15,000
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