Recently, the PLoS Medicine, aninternational authoritative medical journal published the paper, Population Ageing and Mortality During 1990-2017: A Global Decomposition Analysis.This paper was finished by the team led by Professor Hu Guoqing from Xiangya School of Public Health of Central South University (CSU), with Cheng Xunjie, a doctoral student in the class of 2017 as the first author, and Professor Hu Guoqing as the corresponding author.

With the aggravating aging process of the global population, to accurately evaluate the disease burden related to population aging has become a basic research for all countries in scientifically coping with the challenge of population aging. About the main deficiencies in the existing methods to attribute the health impact of population aging (theattribution results are sensitive to the order of attribution factors and the selection of reference groups), Professor Hu’s team proposed a new attribution method which is more stable than the existing ones.

With this proposed attribution method and the data from the Global Burden of Disease Study (GBD) in 2017, the research team systematically estimated the impacts of population aging on 169 causes of death in 195 countries /territories worldwide from 1990 to 2017. Theresults showed substantial changes in numbers of deaths due to population aging among 195 countries /territories: the attributed proportion of deaths increased in most countries and regions but decreased in a few countries and regions; the impacts of population aging on 169 causes of death vary; for a number of disease categories in many countries and regions, the reduction in age-specific mortality rate has alleviated or even offset the health impacts of population aging.

The research results of this paper emphasize that all countries and territories should consider their own situations to formulate or adjust population policies, to implement effective and low-cost interventions, and to promote the healthy population aging.

Link to the full paper:

https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1003138

Source: School of Public Health