Health Sunday, 4 October 2026 · AI-generated content, without human review

WHO: global life expectancy returns to 73.3 years, but dementia and mental disorders on the rise

The World Health Organization's new Global Health Estimates measure mortality trends from 2000 to 2023: non-communicable diseases now cause 74% of deaths worldwide.

Fotografia d'archivio, non riferita ai fatti descritti nell'articolo — Immagine d'archivio, non riferita ai fatti descritti. Foto di ZongJun Xie su Pexels

The World Health Organization has published the new Global Health Estimates, the report that measures mortality and disease burden trends worldwide from 2000 to 2023. This is a twenty-three-year historical series, built to track the evolution of global health over a long time span, not a clinical study on a single population sample.

The first finding concerns life expectancy: in 2023 it rose back to 73.3 years globally, returning close to pre-pandemic levels. This is a recovery that comes after the years in which the spread of the coronavirus had eroded previous progress.

The second finding concerns the type of diseases that today kill the most people worldwide. Non-communicable diseases — those not caused by infectious agents, such as cardiovascular diseases or cancer — now cause 74% of global deaths, compared with 58% recorded in 2000, and represent eight of the ten leading causes of death worldwide. This is a profound change in the structure of global mortality compared with a quarter of a century ago.

Within this picture, the WHO highlights two trends that weigh particularly heavily: deaths from dementia have tripled compared with 2000, while health losses linked to anxiety and depression are sharply increasing. Alain Labrique, director of the WHO’s Data, Analytics and Delivery for Impact division, commented on the overall picture as follows:

“Living longer is one of public health’s greatest successes” — Alain Labrique, director of the WHO’s Data, Analytics and Delivery for Impact division

The report does not formulate therapeutic recommendations or treatment indications: it limits itself to measuring, on a global scale, the evolution of causes of death and disease burden between 2000 and 2023, over a period that also includes the years of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Nearly 3,900 measles cases in the United States in 2026

CDC data indicate the highest toll in years for the disease, with 42 new outbreaks and 95% of confirmed cases linked to localized epidemics.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have reported that, as of October 1, 2026, 3,887 confirmed measles cases had been notified in the United States during the year. The information currently comes from a single source (CDC); no independent confirmation is available, though the CDC is the country’s reference epidemiological surveillance agency.

In 2026, 42 new measles outbreaks were reported. The most significant figure, however, concerns the distribution of cases: 95% of confirmed cases are linked precisely to these outbreaks, rather than to isolated, sporadic infections. This is a proportion that the CDC reports as characteristic of the entire surveillance year, not of a single limited period.

This concentration says something specific about the dynamics of the disease this year: measles is not spreading uniformly across the territory, but is propagating mainly within localized clusters, once the virus finds an entry point into a community. This is a typical feature of highly contagious diseases in the presence of uneven vaccination coverage, although the available data do not allow one to establish, case by case, the reasons for the spread within individual outbreaks or the demographic makeup of those infected.

The toll of 3,887 cases in nine months represents, according to the CDC, the highest figure recorded by the agency in recent years for this disease. The published data are updated as of October 1, 2026, and include both confirmed cases and active outbreaks recorded up to that date; any subsequent revisions to the annual toll will depend on the agency’s upcoming surveillance reports, which in the United States are released periodically throughout the calendar year.

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