By Johanna Eurich and Steve Heimel
The rate of suicide and homicide in the Kusilvak Census Area, located along the lower Yukon River in Alaska, more than doubled since 1980, a rate increase higher than anywhere else in the nation.
By Bruce Japsen
The cost of diabetes, heart disease and back pain are taking a greater toll on the U.S. economy, with these conditions and injuries dominating personal healthcare spending, authors of a new study say.
By Susan Brink
The number of new cancer cases grew worldwide to 17.5 million in 2015 from 13.1 million in 2005. The fastest growth is in some of the world's poorest countries, according to a report on the global burden of cancer in the December 3 journal JAMA Oncology.
By Keegan Hamilton
Drug-related deaths have surged in recent years amid America’s opioid epidemic, but a new study of U.S. mortality rates suggests the problem is even worse than previously thought due to widespread misreporting of cause of death by doctors.
Twenty-nine University of Washington faculty members are among a list of the year’s most highly cited researchers in the natural and social sciences, including Christopher Murray and Mohsen Naghavi of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, and Michael Gale, Alan Lopez and Michael Brauer from the Department of Global Health.
By Dennis Thompson
What causes a person’s death depends in large part on where they spend their lives, concludes a new county-level analysis of U.S. mortality data.
Armed with this sort of information, county and city health departments can focus their efforts on the specific problems affecting their communities, said lead researcher Ali Mokdad, Professor of Global Health at the University of Washington.
By: Olga Khazan
For the first time since the 1990s, Americans are dying at a faster rate, and they’re dying younger. A pair of new studies suggest Americans are sicker than people in other rich countries, and in some states, progress on stemming the tide of basic diseases like diabetes has stalled or even reversed. The studies suggest so-called “despair deaths”—alcoholism, drugs, and suicide—are a big part of the problem, but so is obesity, poverty, and social isolation.
The U.S. death rate is on the rise for the first time in more than 15 years, with life expectancy for a baby born in 2015 dropping slightly, the government reported Thursday.
In a trend that's worrying experts, the nation's death rate — or the number of deaths for every 100,000 U.S. residents — rose 1.2 percent from 2014 to last year, the first noteworthy uptick since 1999.
By Betty Baboujon
Despite decades of warnings, obesity poses a growing problem worldwide. Once it was thought to afflict just affluent countries, where excess can easily become a way of life. In reality, obesity is a global issue affecting poorer countries on a grand scale. While there has been progress in reducing hunger globally, the next stage doesn’t look too promising.
By Ana Mari Cauce and Ali H. Mokdad
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s recent gift for construction of a population-health facility will greatly advance the interdisciplinary and collaborative work of our faculty members, students, partners and collaborators across the UW, the region and the world.