A new online tool predicts the impact of 1,800 diseases on life expectancy and mortality.
- The most frequent diseases were disorders of the circulatory system, neurological system and mental disorders.
- The researchers focused on 39 specific disorders.
What is the impact of a disease on our life expectancy? Danish researchers have tried to answer this question. They created an atlas to estimate the risk of death depending on the disease. In the specialist journal PLOS Medicine, they present their results.
A global estimate
As an article by New Scientist, the calculation of life expectancy is difficult in the event of illness. Often, the estimates are simplified, but become imprecise, and take little account of the age of onset of the pathology. Several studies have looked at the risk of death associated with one or more disorders, but none has covered a wide spectrum of pathologies. The new atlas would be the “most detailed compendium of mortality estimates”suggest the authors.
More than 1800 diseases and disorders identified
In this research, the Danish scientists wanted to have an overview of life expectancy according to pathologies. The atlas is based on anonymized data on 7,378,598 people living in Denmark. They were collected between 2000 and 2018. The researchers identified 1803 disorders and diseases, and then determined epidemiological and mortality parameters, including incidence rates, average ages of onset and comparison of estimates of mortality of people with the disorder with the general population, as well as the years of life lost for each. At the end of their research, they created a statistical tool to visualize the different data.
A future scientific tool
For the authors of this atlas, it is intended to be used by health professionals, researchers, but also policy makers. “Mortality metrics can aid in decision-making and prioritization of healthcare resources“, they believe in a communicated. “Most previous articles have used relative measures of mortality or crude estimates of life expectancy. Here we use a new method that more accurately captures premature mortality for over 1,800 different health conditions“, underlines the main author of the research, Oleguer Plana-Ripoll. Since the publication of the article, the atlas is accessible in lineand to all.
