Heart, lung and brain diseases – top 3 causes of death
Heart attacks, lung diseases and strokes are the three top causes of deaths in India, accounting for over one-third of total deaths.
Along with diabetes and chronic kidney diseases, they make five non-communicable diseases that are part of the top ten causes of death.
Communicable diseases in the top ten include lower respiratory tract diseases like bronchitis and pneumonia, diarrhea, TB and diseases occurring to prematurely born babies.
Road injuries are the tenth most prevalent cause of death. Together, these 10 make up 60% of the 10.3 million deaths that happen in India every year.
The even mix of communicable diseases caused by bacteria or viruses and non-communicable diseases caused by the body’s organs failing due to age or lifestyle choices puts India in the middle of a longdrawn disease transition seen all over the world.
These results are from the Global Burden of Diseases 2015, an estimation of 249 causes of death in 195 countries done by an international team of researchers led by those from Seattle based Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation and published recently in Lancet.
‘With improvement in treatment by antibiotics and better understanding, deaths due to infectious diseases have come down while sedentary life, longer lifespan and other lifestyle habits have pushed up the proportion of non-communicable or metabolic diseases in India,’ said Dr Amit Sengupta, a public health expert affiliated to the Peoples’ Health Movement.
‘The persistence of three eminently treatable infectious diseases and the lack of care in eliminating preterm baby deaths points to the still lagging healthcare system, as also lack of safe drinking water and sanitation,’ he added.
India’s position in the middle of the transition from a poor, healthcare-deficient country to an advanced country is brought out starkly when compared with examples from such countries.
In Niger, one of the poorest countries in the world, with a per capita GDP less than one-fifth of India’s, eight of the top ten causes of death are communicable diseases.
At the other extreme, Norway , with per capita GDP over ten times that of India, has just one communicable disease – lower respiratory tract infections – among its top ten, with the other nine being non-communicable diseases.
China, which started off from conditions similar to India, has moved much further towards the advanced end of the transition. It too has only one infectious disease among its top ten causes of death.
Both India and China have road injuries as one of the major causes of death due to large populations and a rapidly growing number of vehicles on the roads. The large number of types of vehicles (from cycles and bullock carts to fast moving cars) also contributes to the high number of road injuries.
