For how we live.
A Global Burden of Disease analysis finds the share of female breast-cancer deaths tied to high fasting plasma glucose rose from 1990 to 2023 and is projected to keep rising — but the design cannot prove causation.
Pooling 19 studies, researchers found all-cause mortality raised about 1.7-fold in people with ADHD, with suicide and injury deaths most elevated — while those on ADHD medication had lower all-cause mortality.
A CDC field report documents the territory's largest dengue wave in over a decade, driven almost entirely by DENV-2, with one death — the first dengue-associated death there since 2005.
A prespecified analysis of 227,502 veterans who contacted the Veterans Crisis Line found suicide mortality of 0.29% among caring-letter recipients versus 0.27% in historical controls — no measurable difference.
A Valencia hospital reviewed 108 patients with Candidozyma auris candidemia over eight years. Metastatic infection occurred in 22 percent and roughly doubled the risk of death at 60 and 90 days.
In 4,299 people with type 1 diabetes and 17,196 matched controls, the death rate was 131 vs 35 per 100,000 person-years. The excess risk was far larger in women, though absolute mortality was higher in men.
A Global Burden of Disease analysis found early-neonatal mortality in Kazakhstan dropped about 33% from 2010 to 2023 — yet boys kept dying at higher rates than girls, a gap that only recently began to close.
A 37-hospital registry tracked 17,602 adults whose hearts stopped while admitted. CPR usually started within a minute, yet only 9.1% survived to discharge — and after-care lagged far behind the initial response.
A meta-analysis of 15 cohorts found 45% of deaths in people with intellectual and developmental disabilities were classed as avoidable — about 3.6 times the rate in people without disabilities, on rich-country data.
A meta-analysis of 36 studies and 2.6 million women found iatrogenic menopause raised stroke and cardiovascular risk. The death-rate excess was confined to menopause before 45, with null estimates after.
The first dedicated Global Burden of Disease analysis of passive smoking finds exposure falling in relative terms but stuck in absolute numbers, and still causing 1.66 million deaths a year — most from heart disease.
The first GBD 2023 estimate of heart failure maps not just its size but its causes — and the causes split the world: alcohol in eastern Europe, Chagas disease in Latin America, rheumatic disease in the global south.
A randomised trial at eight South Korean hospitals found pulse methylprednisolone no better than a non-pulse regimen for surviving an acute exacerbation of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.
LOGICAL randomised 1,840 unresponsive adults in Australia, New Zealand and Ireland to conservative or liberal oxygen in intensive care. Favourable outcome at 180 days was 38.2% against 39.7%.
A double-blind Danish trial gave the drug or placebo during resuscitation at 21 hospitals. Restored circulation occurred in 39% versus 37% — no meaningful difference — and bicarbonate raised blood alkalosis and sodium.
In the SNAP platform trial, cefazolin was non-inferior to flucloxacillin or cloxacillin for 90-day survival in methicillin-susceptible S. aureus bacteraemia, and caused notably less acute kidney injury.
VICTORY randomised 238 adults with severe burns to intravenous vitamin C or placebo. It was stopped early: 28-day mortality was 15.0% versus 7.6%, and the trial crossed a prespecified harm threshold.
Loading up on dietary fibre is the rare viral trend with strong data behind it: high-fibre eaters have markedly lower mortality. But the evidence is for whole foods, not powders, and tracks a habit, not a one-day stunt.
A PAHO systematic analysis of WHO estimates finds injury rates falling in most of the region but violence and drowning still splitting countries apart, with men carrying nearly three-quarters of the burden.
The Global Burden of Disease 2023 study estimates 2.33 billion NCD incident cases and 263 million DALYs across Africa, with high blood pressure the single largest driver of the continent's NCD deaths.
A new model built on rare donor-transmitted infections estimates China detected 29% and the United States 6% of their rabies deaths, implying hundreds go uncounted each year even where the disease seems rare.
Housing is a health exposure. The mortality data on homelessness are among the starkest in medicine — and a large share of the deaths are from causes health care can treat.
Across 23 cohort studies and 441,199 people, large weight fluctuation was linked to a 41% higher risk of death. Whether the cycling itself does harm, or reflects who cycles, the data cannot fully separate.
Air-popped popcorn is a whole grain, high in fibre and low in fat — a legitimately good snack. What turns it unhealthy is butter, oil, salt and portion size, not the corn itself.
The evidence that recessions and job loss kill is stronger than it looks. Three landmark studies quantify the mortality signal — and where it stops being causal.
Observational studies disagree — evening looked best in adults with obesity, morning-to-midday in the wider population. None is a trial, and total activity dwarfs timing.
Federal statistics put 18.3 million households short of food last year. A 57,404-person cohort links lower food security to higher premature mortality and years of lost life expectancy.
A large treadmill cohort found the least-fit adults had about five times the death rate of the fittest — a bigger risk than coronary disease, smoking or diabetes. But it measures a state, not a lever.
A harmonised meta-analysis of over a million adults found high sitting time raised mortality — but about 60 to 75 minutes a day of activity erased that risk. Being inactive, not the chair itself, did most of the damage.
In 2,292 older adults, weak quadriceps tracked with higher mortality — but muscle size, measured by CT and DXA, did not. The finding reshaped how sarcopenia is defined and moved the target from bulk to strength.
A widely cited cohort found people with diabetes on metformin outlived matched non-diabetic controls. It fuelled the TAME anti-ageing trial — but the human signal is observational, and TAME is not running.
The idea that anti-ageing advances will soon add more than a year of life for every year that passes is popular in longevity circles. National death records point the other way.
One cohort tied high animal protein in midlife to higher mortality, yet found the opposite after 65. Guidelines urge older adults to eat more, and plant protein looks best. No trial proves a lifespan effect.
A harmonised meta-analysis of over a million adults found 60 to 75 minutes of daily moderate activity erased the extra death risk tied to sitting more than eight hours. The catch is how much activity that is.
WHO and ILO estimate long hours caused 745,000 deaths in one year. The effect is real but modest per person, and clearest for stroke rather than heart disease.
A 17-cohort meta-analysis links each extra 1,000 daily steps to 15% lower mortality, and brisk walkers outlive slow ones. But walking builds little strength or top-end fitness.
Observational studies robustly link the diet to lower mortality. The best randomised trial measured fewer heart attacks and strokes, and the strongest review finds the evidence for a survival benefit weak.
VITAL, with 25,871 adults, and D-Health, with 21,315, both tested vitamin D against placebo. Neither cut cancer incidence or cancer death — and one saw a signal pointing the wrong way.
Large cohorts link higher optimism and a stronger sense of purpose to longer life and lower mortality, in a dose-dependent way. But the studies are observational, and no trial has proved the causal arrow.
Meta-analyses of more than a million people find a U-shaped link between sleep duration and death, lowest around seven hours. But this is observational, and reverse causation is the hard part to rule out.
A modelling study of 93 household surveys corrects for the chronic underreporting that hides stillbirths, and finds steady but socially unequal declines in perinatal mortality since 1990.
Higher whole-grain intake is consistently linked to lower rates of heart disease, cancer and early death, with benefit rising up to about seven servings a day. Refined grains show no such signal.
Cohorts link both to modestly higher rates of heart disease and early death, on low-certainty evidence. A 2019 guideline then told people to keep eating them — and split the field over how to weigh nutrition science.
People who eat nuts have lower rates of heart disease and early death in large cohorts, and a Mediterranean diet with nuts cut cardiovascular events in one trial. Most of the evidence is observational.
For heart disease and death, dairy looks roughly neutral to modestly favourable in large cohorts, and the long-standing warning against whole-fat dairy is not well supported by outcome data.
Health authorities converge on a ceiling — under 10% of daily calories, and lower is better still. Large cohorts single out sugary drinks as the form most clearly tied to dying earlier.
A cohort at Kilifi County Hospital found RSV pneumonia killed 2.4% of admitted infants across 25 seasons, with no decline; severe undernutrition and congenital heart disease marked the highest risk.
The signalling that builds muscle in youth appears to speed ageing and cancer. People with lifelong GH deficiency avoid both — and GH given to healthy older adults raises harms without extending life.
Losing a little height with age is expected. But marked loss tracks real risk: men who lost 3 cm or more had 45% higher mortality, and women who lost over 5 cm had roughly 50% higher hip-fracture risk.
In the largest pooled cohort studies, the lowest-risk amount of sleep sits closer to seven hours, and both too little and too much track higher mortality. But the curve is a warning sign, not a prescription.
Men break fewer bones than women but die more often after a hip fracture. No major body recommends screening every man, and the US task force says the evidence is simply not there yet.
Dietary spermidine tracks with markedly lower mortality in one population study. The first year-long randomised trial of a spermidine supplement found no effect on memory.
The dream was 'compression of morbidity' — sickness squeezed into a short window before death. Across 183 countries the healthspan–lifespan gap instead grew to 9.6 years, and to 12.4 in the US.
In 34,485 older adults, each 0.1 m/s of walking speed tracked with better survival. At age 75, predicted 10-year survival ran from 19% to 91% across the range — but speed reflects health, not the reverse.
No pill in the anti-ageing market has mortality data like physical activity. The largest cohorts show most of the benefit arrives at half the recommended dose, and more brings diminishing returns.
A vaccine given in 2017 still cut cholera risk 78% five years on, new data show — even as collapsing water and health services let the outbreak spread through Artibonite and Centre.
Very long life carries real genetic signals — the APOE gene most robustly, FOXO3 in some populations. But pedigree studies put the true heritability of human lifespan well below 10%.
It extends life in yeast, worms and flies, and in mice on a high-fat diet. In people it fails to reliably switch on the enzyme it targets, and higher intake tracks no drop in death, cancer or heart disease.
The 2023 heatwave was associated with an estimated 178,486 excess deaths worldwide, a 2025 analysis finds, with climate change responsible for 54%. Europe's share was 47,690, held down by adaptation.
In 415,000 New Jersey births, infants of mothers who screened positive for depression died before age one at more than three times the rate, an association steady across race, income and preterm birth.
Loneliness and isolation raise mortality risk about as much as well-known risk factors. But trials of interventions to relieve them in older people are mostly low-quality, and the best do more than arrange company.
One study maps the five barriers that delayed life-saving crush-syndrome care; another finds the long-term health burden of the disaster fell hardest on young women.
A review by the country's Public Health Authority credits enforcement and awareness campaigns for falls in crashes, deaths and injuries from 2013 to 2023 — while naming what still holds the Vision 2030 target back.
A landmark cohort found strained spousal caregivers had a 63% higher death rate over four years. Decades of trials show interventions help — more for a carer's knowledge and mood than for the underlying burden.
The famous cigarette comparison is a communications gloss on a robust but observational finding: people with stronger social ties are markedly more likely to survive follow-up.
National surveys show risk behaviours climbing among adults with diabetes since 2007, while a separate study finds noncommunicable-disease mortality nearly twice as high in the worst-affected province as in the best.
In half a million people, weaker grip tracked with higher mortality — a strong marker. But it reads out whole-body strength and health, not a number you move by training your hands.
A 1.5-million-person records study reports lower mortality with GLP-1 drugs than with SGLT2 inhibitors, and the largest absolute gains in people with serious mental illness. The design cannot prove it.
Two large cohorts link purpose in life to lower mortality and lower Alzheimer's risk. Whether purpose protects health, or health sustains purpose, is what the studies cannot fully separate.
More than 2,700 people died in England and Wales during the May and June heatwaves. An attribution study assigns roughly 42% of those deaths to warming.
Emulating a trial inside Veterans Health Administration records, researchers estimated adjusted mortality risk ratios of 0.90 to 0.84 for starting continuous glucose monitoring in older-onset type 1 diabetes.
A sibling-controlled cohort of 1.1 million men, a genetic analysis of 712 traits and a UK Biobank study of fitness change converge — and they agree on where the exception is.
Chronic granulomatous disease is usually X-linked in Western cohorts. A multicentre Middle East and North Africa registry found the opposite pattern, alongside late diagnosis and a median survival of 8.5 years.
Across 107 cohort studies and 4.8 million people, the protective effect of moderate drinking disappeared once the comparison group stopped including people who had quit because they were ill.
Researchers modelled 854 European cities under the climate that exists and the one that would have existed without human warming. The attributable share rose from 45% to 64%.
A case-crossover study of 29,604 arrests over a decade found risk lowest around the 86th temperature percentile and higher at both local extremes, with the cold tail slightly larger.
A harmonised meta-analysis of more than a million people found the association between sitting time and death disappeared in the most active quarter. In the least active, it did not disappear at all.
A rare multicentre record from three Sudanese trauma centres finds penetrating injury in more than nine of ten patients, and civilians in the great majority.
A study of 19,539 patients echoed the randomised CONVINCE trial — but it was observational, and several of its authors work for the dialysis company that owns the data.
In 390,124 US adults followed up to 27 years, daily multivitamin use showed no mortality benefit. Randomised trials within COSMOS found a real but modest effect on memory, and none on physical function.
A dose-response meta-analysis of 94 cohorts and more than 30 million people found the steepest part of the curve sits between zero and the recommended weekly dose, with small and uncertain gains above double it.
A 2025 meta-analysis of 57 studies found the mortality curve bending at about 7,000 steps a day. The 10,000 figure traces to the trade name of a Japanese step counter sold in 1965.
The final HARMONi-A analysis reports a 2.7-month gain in median overall survival — 16.8 versus 14.1 months — for the PD-1/VEGF bispecific added to chemotherapy in a China-only phase 3 trial.
A registry study spanning 4.9 million people separates where the most deaths occur from where the inequality is largest. Heart disease and lung disease give different answers.
Maricopa County runs some of the most detailed heat mortality surveillance in the US. A distributed lag model applied to the same five years put the toll far higher — and the gap is the method, not a scandal.
A registered report fit identical models to 11 longitudinal studies covering 175,070 people. The subjective feeling carried the signal; the objective count of social contacts largely did not.
A Bulletin of the WHO study recorded 168 maternal deaths between October 2023 and June 2024, alongside higher stillbirth, neonatal-death and preterm-birth rates than before the war.
Three cohorts, 147,374 people, 30 years and 35,798 deaths. The dose-response curve flattened above 120 minutes per week, and the cancer signal appeared at the low end, not the high end.
Two peer-reviewed studies chart the toll: among 122 Khartoum dialysis patients followed for up to 18 months, 53% survived, and those who stayed in the capital fared worst.
A national case-crossover study of 236,260 chronic kidney disease deaths finds women, over-65s and people in cooler regions most affected — and projects the burden nearly quadrupling by the 2090s.
An analysis of nearly 30 years of confirmed heat deaths finds many occurred well under standard alert thresholds, and that humidity-based measures may track risk more consistently.
The comparison group matters: against veterans with unspecified narcolepsy diagnoses, the mortality gap widened to 140% higher odds. The study can't yet say what's driving the excess deaths.
Moderate-to-severe sleep apnea alone roughly doubled all-cause mortality risk. Adding comorbid insomnia to the same patients raised it further — evidence for treating the combination as its own risk category.
A meta-analysis spanning two decades of research found extreme cold carried a higher relative risk of death than extreme heat or heatwaves — even as warming shifts public attention toward summer temperatures.
In 1,362 Shanghai dialysis patients followed for over three years, hemoadsorption plus haemodialysis lowered all-cause mortality versus dialysis alone — a borderline result from an open-label trial.
A 14-year national analysis finds temperature-related death rates rising fastest in the group that started highest — and the same pattern in cold deaths, which fell for everyone else.
In 30,446 Malmö residents followed for decades, each step up in soot exposure was tied to 15% higher cardiovascular mortality — a stronger, steadier signal than total fine particles or traffic gases.
A wavier jet stream delivered severe cold to three continents in a month that was 1.47°C above pre-industrial globally. Two new studies quantify what cold still does to mortality.
A nationwide register study found a hazard ratio of 0.96 for all-cause death among users of menopausal hormone therapy. The raw death rate in users was higher — which is the part worth understanding.
WHO and CDC estimate cases climbed about 20% in a single year, and the number of countries hit by large or disruptive outbreaks jumped from 36 to 57 — while global first-dose coverage stayed flat.
The Lancet Global Health paper that produced this month's headline number also produced a larger one: 22.6 million additional deaths by 2030 if defunding deepens. The distinction matters more than the figure.
About 260,000 women died in pregnancy or childbirth in 2023; 37 conflict-affected or fragile countries accounted for 61% of those deaths while holding only a quarter of the world's births.
A December survey found getting stronger is the leading 2026 health goal. The best meta-analysis of muscle-strengthening and mortality finds a benefit that plateaus at around 30 to 60 minutes a week.
Berkeley researchers followed older Californians for a decade. Cumulative smoke exposure predicted death better than the number of smoke days did — which is not how air quality is usually reported.
Across 11 surveillance sites in sub-Saharan Africa, nighttime heatwave mortality risk rose between 2005-2010 and 2011-2015 — the opposite of the adaptation trend reported in wealthy countries.
A meta-regression across 28 countries put pooled prevalence near 4-5% and standardised mortality ratios between 1.8 and 4.7, in a condition the Global Burden of Disease study does not count.
Researchers tested heat-mortality forecasts against the European summers of 2022 and 2023. The skill pattern is not the one a warning system designer would have guessed.
A new GBD analysis puts sepsis-related deaths at 21.4 million, roughly double the 11.0 million estimated for 2017 — a change driven partly by COVID-19 and partly by a different method.
A 47-prefecture analysis of a decade of heatstroke mortality finds the alert level set at 33C misses almost all of the deaths a warning could plausibly prevent. About 31C would halve them.
Age-standardised disability-adjusted life-years fell 12.6% since 2010, but the raw total rose 6.1% to 2.80 billion. Anxiety, depression and diabetes rose fastest even after adjusting for ageing.
A global analysis separates exposure inequality from mortality inequality and finds they run in opposite directions between countries, and sometimes within them.
One projects 71,420 US deaths a year from wildfire smoke by 2050. The other projects 1.4 million globally by the end of the century, with Africa's burden rising elevenfold. Both rest on modelled chains, not observations.
A 50-year attribution study separates two trends that usually get modelled as one: rising temperatures and a population that has become less likely to die in them.
A nine-year case time-series across every municipality finds both ends of the temperature range raise mortality risk on a Caribbean island, with the burden spread unevenly across towns.
A pan-tropical analysis links deforestation-driven local warming to about 28,000 heat-related deaths a year, with Southeast Asia carrying the highest rate.
A 15-city study found a pooled relative risk of exactly 1.00 for heat warnings. Adjusting for green space, population and density turned it into 0.85. Both numbers are in the same paper.
About 1,009 deaths a year were attributable to heatwaves in 2016-2019. Queensland and New South Wales carried rates more than three times Western Australia's.