14 DAY TRIAL // According to a new scientific paper, released by health experts at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), the three most deadly, yet preventable, factors that threaten the wellbeing of American citizens are smoking, high blood pressure, and being overweight. Working together with colleagues from the University of Toronto and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, at the University of Washington, the scientists have learned that more than 1.2 million Americans die prematurely each year, on account of the effects of these three factors.
Bleak statistics show that smoking is the leading cause of premature death, with more than 467,000 people passing away because of it each year. The “runner-up,” high blood pressure, accounts for an estimated 395,000 deaths, resulting from the disease itself, as well as from a number of other complications.
Being overweight or obese has been calculated to be responsible for approximately 216,000 deaths around the United States yearly, but the death toll attributed to conditions related to body weight has not yet been calculated. The researchers have mentioned that diabetes also fits within this category, which means that the total number of premature deaths could be a lot higher.
“The large magnitude of the numbers for many of these risks made us pause. To have hundreds of thousands of premature deaths caused by these modifiable risk factors is shocking and should motivate a serious look at whether our public health system has sufficient capacity to implement interventions and whether it is currently focusing on the right set of interventions,” the lead author of the recent study, HSPH doctoral student Goodarz Danaei, explained. A paper detailing the finds appears in the April 28th issue of the open-access journal PLoS Medicine. The senior author of the research is HSPH Associate Professor of International Health Majid Ezzati.
“The findings should be a reminder that although we have been effective in partially reducing smoking and high blood pressure, we have not yet completed the task and have a great deal more to do on these major preventable factors. The government should also use regulatory, pricing, and health information mechanisms to substantially reduce salt and trans fats in prepared and packaged foods and to support research that can find effective strategies for modifying the other dietary, lifestyle, and metabolic risk factors that cause large numbers of premature deaths in the US,” Ezzati added.
The researcher concluded by saying that 21 percent of all male deaths that occurred in the US each year were caused by smoking. Annually, some 248,000 men die in the country because of complications they suffer in their lungs from smoking tobacco. Conversely, 230,000 American women pass away each year on account of high blood pressure, which exceeds several times the number of females that succumb to breast cancer (42,000).