Due to disorders of the nervous system, 443 million years of healthy life have been lost worldwide

More than 443 million years of healthy life will be lost to disorders of the nervous system worldwide in 2021, an 18 percent increase from 1990, the study found.
Nervous system disorders such as strokes, migraines and dementia have overtaken heart disease to become the leading cause of ill health worldwide, according to a major new study published today.

More than 3.4 billion people, or 43 percent of the world’s population, will experience a neurological condition in 2021, far more than previously thought, research has found.

The study was conducted by hundreds of scientists led by the American Institute for Health Measurement and Evaluation (IHME), which has become a global reference for health statistics.

Study leader Jaimie Steinmetz of the IHME said the results show that disorders of the nervous system are now “the world’s leading cause of the total burden of disease”.

The number of cases of these disorders has increased by 59 percent in the past three decades, she said, and the increase is largely driven by the fact that the world’s population is aging and the number of people is increasing rapidly.

Scientists studied how 37 different neurological conditions affected ill health, disability and premature death in 204 countries and territories from 1990 to 2021.

This data is used to estimate how many years of healthy life are lost due to each of these conditions, called disability life years (DALYs).

More than 443 million years of healthy life will be lost to disorders of the nervous system worldwide in 2021, an 18 percent increase from 1990, the study found.

However, if the results were adjusted for age and the growing size of the world’s population, DALYs and deaths from these conditions actually fell by about a third, the researchers said.

By far the worst is the situation with strokes, which are responsible for 160 million years of healthy life lost.

They are followed by a form of brain damage called neonatal encephalopathy, migraines, dementia including Alzheimer’s disease, nerve damage from diabetes, meningitis and epilepsy.

Cognitive impairment caused by Covid is ranked 20th.

More than 11 million people died from 37 neurological conditions in 2021, according to a study published in The Lancet Neurology.
Cardiovascular disease remained the leading cause of death, claiming the lives of 19.8 million people worldwide in 2022, the IHME reported last year.

The most common among neurological disorders, according to research, are tension headaches and migraines.

The fastest growing condition is nerve damage called diabetic neuropathy caused by the increasing number of diabetes cases.

There is no cure for most of these conditions, but there are ways to reduce the risk, including reducing rates of high blood pressure, diabetes and alcohol consumption, researchers say.
They called for much more to be done to prevent, treat and rehabilitate disorders that disproportionately affect poorer countries.

The neurological “burden” in the world is growing very fast and will cause even greater pressure on health systems in the coming decades, warned study co-author Valery Feigin.
For the first time, a study of the global burden of disease looked at the impact of neurological disorders on children.

They account for nearly one-fifth of all DALYs, meaning that children worldwide lost 80 million years of healthy life to these disorders in 2019 alone.