CHDS’ Stéphane Verguet and colleagues recently published in Nature Medicine that reducing preventable deaths from major noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) and injuries around the world would come with substantial economic savings.
As the global population ages rapidly, national governments face increasingly tough resource allocation decisions regarding the health sector. To provide a framework to help policymakers with these decisions, Verguet’s study estimated the economic value of reducing avoidable deaths caused by major NCDs (e.g., cancers and cardiovascular disease (CVD)) and injuries in 2000, 2019, and, forward, in 2050; in three geographic regions: Eurasia and the Mediterranean, Latin America and the Caribbean, and sub- Saharan Africa, along with India, China, and high-income countries.
The researchers found that the economic value of reducing avoidable deaths from CVD would be between 2 and 8% of annual income in 2019 in any region of the world. In addition, the economic value of reducing avoidable mortality from cancers would be large in high-income countries and China, around 5% of annual income in 2019, and the economic value of reducing avoidable mortality from injuries would be large in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean, around 5% of annual income in 2019.
Learn more: Read the publication, The Economic Value of Reducing Mortality Due to Noncommunicable Diseases and Injuries
Learn more: Read the Harvard Chan School story, Economic Savings ‘Substantial’ from Reducing Avoidable Deaths from Chronic Disease and Injury
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