US burden of disease: future scenarios

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity

IHME produces its forecasts using estimates from the Global Burden of Disease study. We account for trends in disease burden, as well as taking into account trends in key determinants of health. So things like risk factors, such as high blood pressure, or environmental risk factors like air pollution.

We also take into account key interventions, like vaccination for key infectious diseases. And we incorporate all of these to produce forecasts for disease mortality and morbidity, for over 350 different causes of disease and disability. In this analysis, we focused on our forecasts for the US, as well as the 50 states and the District of Columbia.

Life expectancy at the national level is expected to increase from just over 78 years in 2022, to just over 80 years by 2050. That’s for both sexes combined. That increase – or that modest increase, rather – is expected to lower our global ranking from 49th in 2022 to 66th in 2050.

Drug use disorders and lower back pain are expected to be the primary causes contributing to, or the leading causes of disability-adjusted life years in 2050.

Healthy life expectancy is the number of years that a person is expected to live in good health over the course of their lifetime, assuming that their mortality and disability rates remain constant into the future.

It’s very similar to life expectancy, but estimates of HALE are generally lower than those of life expectancy, because it takes into account years of life that someone may have lived in non-optimal or poor health.

The US’s global ranking is expected to decline over the next several decades. And for HALE, or healthy life expectancy, that ranking is expected to drop from 80th in 2022 to 108th by 2050.

For female life expectancy in the United States, we’re also expecting a decline in our ranking among other countries, down to 74th in 2050. And that’s quite a substantial decline, where we were ranked 19th in 1990 and 51st in 2022.

Among the states, we’re forecasting a decline in life expectancy for women in West Virginia from 1990 to 2050. And, after 2023, several states are forecasting plateaus in female life expectancy through 2050, including Oklahoma, South Dakota, Maine, and Wisconsin.