The Global Burden of Disease Study (GBD) is the most comprehensive assessment of health trends and conditions across countries. GBD provides detailed analysis of disease burden related to life expectancy, non-communicable diseases, mental health, and many other health topics. We discuss the latest GBD with IHME Director Dr. Christopher Murray.
Read the GBD 2023 capstones, published in The Lancet:• Global demographic analysis: http://ms.spr.ly/6047s2bOv• Global causes of death: http://ms.spr.ly/6040s2bOI• Global burden of diseases, injuries, and risk factors: http://ms.spr.ly/6041s2bOLAccess and share all things related to GBD 2023: updated data visualization tools, comprehensive infographics, informative videos, workshops, webinars, and more: https://www.healthdata.org/announcing-launch-gbd-2023-study-results.________________________Transcript
Rhonda Stewart: Welcome to Global Health Insights, a podcast from IHME, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. I’m Rhonda Stewart. 
 
In this episode, we’ll hear From IHME director Dr. Christopher Murray as he talks about the latest Global Burden of Disease study, also known as GBD.  
 
GBD 2023 is a series of three papers published in The Lancet and presented at the World Health Summit in Berlin. The papers focus on demographic analysis, causes of death, and diseases, injuries, and risk factors. GBD is the largest and most detailed scientific effort undertaken to quantify health trends. GBD provides a unique platform to compare the magnitude of diseases, injuries and risk factors across age groups, sexes, countries, regions, and time. 
 
For decision-makers, the GBD approach provides a unique way to compare countries’ health progress and to understand factors that impact health such as high blood pressure, cancer, and heart disease. 
 
Led by IHME at the University of Washington, GBD is a truly global effort, with more than 16,000 researchers from over 160 countries and territories participating in the most recent update. The latest GBD includes data on topics ranging from life expectancy to mental health to noncommunicable diseases. 
 
Chris, the 2023 Global Burden of Disease study covers three capstones published in The Lancet and presented at the World Health Summit in Berlin. The papers cover demographic analysis, causes of death, and diseases, injuries, and risk factors. 
 
Let’s start by talking about the demographic analysis paper. The global age-standardized mortality rate declined significantly since 1950, but that’s only part of the story. What are some of the other key findings from that paper? 
 
Christopher Murray: Well, in the demographic analysis, there’s both the long-term view of progress in expanding life expectancy that has been quite steady, except for the big interruptions due to the HIV epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa as well as the sort of mortality crises in Eastern Europe and Central Asia that occurred in the late 80s and 90s. 
 
But other than those, up to 2019, we had this sort of pattern of progress that we got used to. Then the COVID epidemic came along: 18 million deaths related to COVID and a big drop in life expectancy, and then it really was even worse in 2021 in many countries. And then it bounced back. And so by 2023, we’ve gone in most places back to 2019 levels, but not back yet to the levels we would have expected if the pandemic hadn’t occurred. So that’s one big part of the story. 
 
Another part is the fact that we’ve seen increases in child and adolescent mortality in some parts of the world, particularly some of the high-income countries – the US and Canada stand out. And then we've seen increases in mortality related to drug use disorders, suicides to some extent, in adults that are more in the 25- to 39-year range. 
 
And then there are some changes in methods and data that we now think that younger adult mortality in Africa is higher than we previously thought and older adult mortality is little bit lower than we previou
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