all Majid Ezzati stories

Smoking and solid-fuel-burning in homes in China projected to cause millions of deaths

404132862 — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 14:20:51 -0400

Life expectancy stagnating, worsening, for large segment of U.S. population

yvette — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 16:20:41 -0400

A new, long-term study of mortality trends in U.S. counties from 1960 to 2000 finds that an overall average life expectancy increase of 6.5 years for men and women is not reaching many parts of the country. Instead, the life expectancy of a significant segment of the population is actually declining or at best stagnating.

Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and the University of Washington found that 4% of the male population and 19% of the female population experienced either decline or stagnation in mortality beginning in the 1980s.

Improving child survival around the globe is key goal of United Nations

jake — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 11:35:56 -0400

Reducing child mortality rates for children under 5 — which in 2004 was 6.5 (per 1,000 children annually) in Latin America and the Caribbean, about 20 in South Asia, and 39 in sub-Saharan Africa — is one of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). These goals were established at the beginning of this decade to address the problems of global poverty, health, and sustainability. Targets were set related to these issues, to be achieved by 2015. However, there are concerns at the midway point that the targets will not be achieved.

Research shows who dies when and where

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 12:07:39 -0400

In the United States, the best-off people, like Asian women in Bergen County, N.J., have a life expectancy 33 years longer than the worst-off, Native American males in some South Dakota counties - 91 versus 58 years. So concludes the most comprehensive study to date of who dies when and where in this country.

In order to determine how unequal life expectancy is in the United States, and why, researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard Initiative for Global Health analyzed census and health statistics data for the years 1982 to 2001. They found what they call "an enormous gap" in life expectancies based on race, counties of residence, income, and a few other social factors.

Obesity levels in U.S. states are grossly underestimated

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 06:26:44 -0400

The prevalence of obesity in the U.S. states has been greatly underestimated. Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health analyzed data from health surveys, which are used to estimate obesity levels in states. Because people tend to provide incorrect information about their weight and height, especially in telephone surveys, the researchers concluded that estimates of obesity in individual states have been too low, by more than 50 percent. Their study, which corrects for misreporting in those surveys, appears in the May 2006 issue of the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.

Obesity is one of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality, causing some 2.6 million deaths worldwide each year. In the U.S., survey data on obesity on a national and state level is obtained using information gathered by the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), which uses telephone interviews; national data is also collected using the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), which does in-person interviews and follow-up height and weight measurements on people who agree to a clinical exam. Lead author Majid Ezzati , associate professor of international health at HSPH, and his colleagues analyzed and compared the data from the two surveys in order to quantify the level of bias when people self-report their height and weight, especially in a telephone interview.

Based on this new understanding of the survey data, the authors found that, on average, women tend to underestimate their weight while men do not. When it comes to height, young and middle-aged men tend to overestimate their height more than women in the same age group.

In 2002, the corrected prevalence of obesity in the U.S. population was 28.7 percent for adult men and 34.5 percent for adult women, more than 50 percent higher than previously estimated.

The research, which presents the first-ever corrected estimates of obesity for individual states, found that Southern states have the highest levels of obesity in the country.

This work was supported by a cooperative agreement from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention through the Association of Schools of Public Health and by the National Institute on Aging.

Benefits of clean fuel in Africa would be enormous

50443248 — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 09:18:41 -0400

A study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), finds that promoting cleaner, more efficient technologies for producing charcoal in Africa can save millions of lives and have significant climate change and development benefits. The findings appear in the April 1 issue of the journal Science.

Tobacco deaths a developing problem

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:30:24 -0400

Research published in the Sept. 13, 2003 issue of the medical journal The Lancet shows that global tobacco deaths were about 4.8 million in 2000, with about 2.4 million each in developing and industrialized nations. "The bottom line is that tobacco at this point in time is no longer [just] a Western problem," said Harvard School of Public Health Assistant Professor Majid Ezzati, who conducted the research with University of Queensland Professor Alan Lopez. Though the research paints a bleak picture of 2000's tobacco-related mortality, it also hints that things are about to get much worse unless anti-smoking campaigns and policies are stepped up globally. Though deaths due to tobacco are roughly equal in the industrialized and developing worlds, most of the world's smokers - 930 million out of 1.1 billion - live in developing countries and middle-income nations, including Eastern European nations in the former Soviet bloc. Ezzati said there haven't yet been more deaths in developing countries because it takes 20 to 30 years of smoking before large-scale illness and death become visible. Without vigorous anti-smoking campaigns, a large increase in tobacco-related deaths is looming.

Adding years to your life

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:30:36 -0400

A research team did the first global study of the potential increase in life expectancy if 20 well-known risk factors could be eliminated or reduced to safer levels. These factors include overnourishment and undernourishment, unsafe sex, high blood pressure, elevated cholesterol, tobacco, alcohol and other drugs, polluted water, poor sanitation, and certain on-the-job risks. "We wanted to give a picture of what the whole world would look like without these major causes of death and disease," notes Majid Ezzati, an assistant professor at the Harvard School of Public Health. "Approximately half of deaths and 40 percent of the total health loss worldwide resulted from the joint effects of these risk factors in the year 2000. It was surprising to find out how large the effects of eliminating them were. The increase in healthy life expectancy ranges from 4.4 years in Japan, Australia, and New Zealand to more than 16 years in Botswana, Congo, Kenya, and other parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Think of it, excluding these factors could result in an average gain of more than nine years of perfect health for every person in the world."