People worldwide are living about as long as they did before the pandemic, but more of those years are shaped by chronic disease, according to the World Health Organization’s Global Health Estimates covering 2000 to 2023.
Global life expectancy reached 73.3 years in 2023, just below the 73.4 years recorded in 2019, the WHO figures show. Healthy life expectancy — the years lived in full health — stood at 62.8 years. The gap between the two numbers is the quiet headline: roughly a decade of life, on average, is now lived with illness or disability.
The causes of death have shifted steadily toward long-term conditions. Noncommunicable diseases — including heart disease, cancer, diabetes and chronic respiratory illness — accounted for 74% of deaths, up from 58% in 2000, according to the estimates. That rise reflects ageing populations, urban living, tobacco and alcohol use, air pollution and diet, layered over two decades.
Ischaemic heart disease remained the single largest killer, at about 9.5 million deaths. Its persistence at the top of the table, year after year, makes cardiovascular prevention — blood pressure control, smoking cessation, cholesterol management — the highest-yield target in global health, even as newer threats take the headlines.
The sharpest movement in the rankings came from dementia. Deaths from dementia tripled over the period, lifting it from the 19th leading cause of death to the 5th, according to the WHO data. As more people survive into their eighties and nineties, the burden shifts from dying early to living long with cognitive decline — a cost carried by families and care systems as much as by hospitals.
COVID-19, by contrast, fell out of the top 10 causes. The pandemic that reshaped mortality statistics in 2020 and 2021 has receded as a direct killer, leaving the longer, slower epidemic of chronic disease back in command of the numbers.
The estimates, which run through 2023, offer health systems a clear brief: the fight is no longer only about adding years, but about compressing the sick years inside them.
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