Anxiety disorders in the Western Pacific hit 87 million cases, rising fastest since 2010

Anxiety disorders are among the largest non-fatal contributors to the global disease burden, yet they are measured unevenly across the world. A Global Burden of Disease (GBD) 2023 analysis published in the Journal of Anxiety Disorders on 21 September fills in one of the gaps, quantifying the burden, trends, and socioeconomic inequalities of anxiety disorders across 31 countries and territories in the Western Pacific region from 1990 to 2023 [s1].

What the study measured

Using GBD 2023 data, the authors estimated prevalence, incidence, and disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) for anxiety disorders, then calculated age-standardised rates to allow fair comparison across places and years [s1]. They analysed temporal trends with joinpoint regression, assessed socioeconomic inequality using the slope and concentration indices anchored to the sociodemographic index (SDI), and applied a Das Gupta decomposition to separate how much of the change in burden came from population growth, population ageing, and genuine shifts in the underlying epidemiology [s1].

That last step matters, because it is the difference between a region simply having more people and a region where anxiety is genuinely becoming more common. It is the question most readers want answered when they see a burden figure rising.

A word on the terms. Prevalence counts everyone living with the disorder at a point in time; incidence counts only the new cases arising within the year; and DALYs combine years lived with disability and years of life lost, giving a single measure of health loss. For a condition like anxiety, which is rarely fatal but often long-running, the DALY total is driven almost entirely by disability rather than death, which is why these disorders rank so high on non-fatal burden while barely registering in mortality statistics [s1].

What the numbers say

In 2023, anxiety disorders accounted for 87.1 million prevalent cases, 12.6 million incident (newly arising) cases, and 10.3 million DALYs across the region [s1]. The age-standardised DALY rate was 456.8 per 100,000 [s1].

Two patterns in who carries the burden stand out. It peaked in the 10–14 age group — early adolescence, not adulthood — and it was consistently higher in females than in males [s1]. The age pattern lines up with a long-standing clinical observation, echoed by the World Health Organization, that the symptoms of anxiety disorders often begin in childhood or adolescence [s2].

The trend over time was upward. From 1990 to 2023, age-standardised rates for prevalence, incidence, and DALYs all rose significantly, and the increase accelerated after 2010 [s1]. Because these are age-standardised rates, the rise cannot be explained away by ageing or population size alone — it reflects a real increase in how common anxiety disorders are [s1].

The decomposition sharpened that point. Of the total increase in DALYs, population growth accounted for 57.4% and epidemiological change — the genuine rise in disease frequency — contributed 41.7% [s1]. In other words, most of the raw increase comes from there simply being more people, but a substantial minority comes from anxiety becoming genuinely more prevalent. The inequality analysis found no significant association between burden and a country's SDI, meaning the rising tide was not confined to the richer or the poorer economies of the region [s1].

Why it matters

The regional findings sit inside a larger global picture. The WHO describes anxiety disorders as the world's most common mental disorders, affecting 470 million people in 2023, with more women affected than men [s2]. The agency also notes a persistent treatment gap: approximately one in four people with an anxiety disorder receives treatment for it, despite the existence of highly effective therapies [s2]. A burden that is rising fastest among adolescents and women, as the Western Pacific analysis describes, collides directly with that gap [s1][s2].

The authors are explicit about the implication, calling for strengthened prevention, surveillance, and diagnostic capacity to meet a growing burden [s1]. Two caveats temper the precision of the figures. First, GBD estimates for mental disorders are modelled from survey and prevalence data of varying quality across 31 countries, so the exact totals carry uncertainty even where the direction of travel is clear [s1]. Second, rising measured prevalence can partly reflect better recognition and reporting rather than a purely biological increase — a known challenge in mental-health epidemiology that the age-standardised, decomposed design is intended to address but cannot fully rule out [s1]. What the analysis establishes firmly is the shape of the problem: a large, growing anxiety burden across the Western Pacific, accelerating since 2010, and landing hardest on the young and on women [s1].

Sources

• [s1] Burden, trends, and inequalities of anxiety disorders in the Western Pacific region, 1990-2023: A systematic analysis of the Global Burden of Disease Study 2023. Journal of Anxiety Disorders. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.janxdis.2026.103233
• [s2] Anxiety disorders (fact sheet). World Health Organization. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/anxiety-disorders