Blood pressure, smoking and alcohol: the health risks with the biggest global burden

Over 9 million people died as a consequence of high blood pressure in 2010, making it the health risk factor with the greatest toll worldwide, say experts.

Smoking and alcohol use have also overtaken child hunger in the last two decades to become the second and third leading risks globally, according to a study estimating the disease burden attributable to 43 risk factors in 1990 and 2010.

The analysis was undertaken by an international consortium of scientists as part of the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010, which was published in The Lancet today.

"Overall we're seeing a growing burden of risk factors that lead to chronic diseases in adults, such as cancer, heart disease and diabetes, and a decreasing burden for risks associated with infectious diseases in children," says Professor Majid Ezzati of the School of Public Health at Imperial College London, one of the study's senior authors. "But this global picture disguises the starkly different trends across regions. The risks associated with poverty have come down in most places, like Asia and Latin America, but they remain the leading issues in sub-Saharan Africa."

The researchers estimated both the number of deaths attributed to each risk factor and disability-adjusted life years (DALYs), a unit that takes into account both years of life lost and years lived with disability.

"We looked at risk factors for which good data are available on how many people are exposed to the risks and how strong their effects are, so that our results can inform policy and programmatic choices," said associate professor Stephen Lim at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. IHME served as the coordinating center for GBD 2010.