According to a British study published in the medical journal The Lancet, adopting a healthier lifestyle by populations could prevent 37 million premature deaths by 2025 worldwide.
According to a recent study by researchers at Imperial College London, 37 million premature deaths could be avoided or delayed if all the world’s populations changed their current lifestyles in favor of healthier habits. To achieve this result, scientists recommend acting on 6 risk factors for health such as the consumption of tobacco, alcohol, salt, high blood pressure, obesity and diabetes.
Prioritize tobacco consumption and high blood pressure
To hope to save these lives and thereby increase the life expectancy of the world’s population, London researchers say it is imperative to remove the 2 most important risk factors: tobacco, at the origin, according to WHO, 6 million deaths worldwide each year, and high blood pressure, which could reach 1.56 billion people within 10 years.
The researchers recommend for this:
– reduce tobacco consumption by a third, and ideally by half;
– restrict by 10% that of alcohol;
– and reduce salt consumption by 30%.
A healthier lifestyle to save millions of lives
The final objective of adopting these recommendations is to reduce the number of people with arterial hypertension by 25% and to stop the growing number of people with diabetes and obesity. By 2015, more than 16 million deaths worldwide, among those aged 30 to 70, could be delayed or avoided, as well as 21 million premature deaths among people over the age of 70.
According to Professor Majid Ezzati, principal signatory of the study and specialist in health, environment and nutrition, adopting a healthier lifestyle and meeting these goals could “ increase the decline in mortality from cardiovascular and chronic respiratory diseases, halve the number of deaths from lung and stomach cancer, and reverse the trend in diabetes-related mortality. He also adds that low and middle income populations will be the main beneficiaries of this change in habits: 31 million lives could be saved from premature death.
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