IHME in the news

Nearly 60 percent of all adults and a third of all children in the world will be overweight or obese by 2050 unless governments take action, says a new study.

Rates of obesity and overweight are spiralling due to a “monumental societal failure” to tackle the problem, with more than half of adults and almost a third of children and young people set to be affected by 2050, according to a new study.

Global failures in the response to the growing obesity crisis over the past three decades have led to a staggering increase in the numbers affected, according to the analysis published in The Lancet.

Without drastic intervention, 3.80 billion adults over the age of 25 years will have overweight and obesity around the world by 2050 compared to 2.11 billion in 2021.

Ambulatory care is one of the fastest-growing sectors in the health care industry. It is also the most expensive, according to a new set of studies published in JAMA and JAMA Health Forum.

A new study by researchers at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation covers more than three-quarters of nationwide health spending last decade. Among the health conditions where more than $5 billion was spent overall, they found that autism had the fastest annual pace of growth, at 13%.

[A report measuring the state of public trust and discourse] finds that the U.S. economy is performing better than any of its peers and pulling away from the economies of Europe and Japan.

Called "Ten Americas," the analysis published late last year in The Lancet found that "one's life expectancy varies dramatically depending on where one lives, the economic conditions in that location, and one's racial and ethnic identity."

Theo Vos, an epidemiologist and emeritus professor at the University of Washington who was not involved in the study, said that dementia is a difficult condition to consistently measure, in part because norms around listing it as the cause of death have varied by country and changed over time.

“The extent and magnitude of health disparities in American society are truly alarming in a country with the wealth and resources of the USA,” senior author Christopher J.L. Murray said.

Dr. Ng [Marie Ng, an affiliate associate professor at IHME] and her co-authors wrote that existing policies have failed to do enough to address the crisis, adding that “major reform” was needed to prevent it from worsening.

Such policy-based behavioral interventions usually have little effect on preventing weight gain or causing weight loss in the real world, at least in the short term. But the GLP-1 drugs could be different, says Theo Vos, an epidemiologist at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington in Seattle.

India should protect its people not just from cancer, but also from the financial strain of treatment.

Globally, it is estimated that one in seven (14%) of 10–19-year-olds experience mental health conditions [according to GBD data], yet these remain largely unrecognized and untreated.

Another study from the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries and Risk Factors (GBD) Tobacco Forecasting Collaborators, also published in the same journal, looked at speeding up the decline in tobacco smoking globally.