- 43 posts this week
- 21 drivers followed
- 3 trackers refreshed
- Releases this week
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Official figures
Where the evidence stands
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established strengtheningEnvironment: air, heat, cold
How air pollution, heat and cold affect how long people live, how the attribution is made, and how the balance is changing.
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building mixedCancer
Which cancers are rising and which falling, what screening and new tests find earlier, what treatment has done to survival.
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established mixedSocial connection
How isolation and loneliness shorten lives, proving the causal relationship and what can be done.
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established mixedSmoking and vaping
How far smoking has fallen and how many deaths it still causes, what vaping is doing to the people who take it up, and what generational bans will show.
No papers yet -
emerging mixedMedicine out of hospital
What wearables, remote monitoring and care at home add to how health is measured and delivered, and whether it shows in outcomes.
No papers yet -
building strengtheningObesity, diabetes and the GLP-1 drugs
Are obesity and diabetes still rising, understanding behavioural change and public policy, what difference do GLP-1 and friends make.
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building strengtheningNew medicines
Which new drugs and vaccines could plausibly move how long people live, whether they reach the people who would benefit, and what the record says about medicines and life expectancy.
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building strengtheningMigration and population change
How far fertility has fallen below what was projected, how migration has become the assumption that moves projections most, and what both do to the mortality statistics.
No papers yet -
building strengtheningWhat linked data reveals
What linked registries are making it possible to know about whole populations
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building mixedMeasuring and projecting life expectancy
How the numbers are made, how much they revise their own past, and how well mortality can be forecast — and by whom.
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established steadyInfectious disease and pandemics
Infectious disease and pandemics: understanding both the risks and how well prepared we are
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established strengtheningInequalities in health and length of life
Whether inequalities in health and length of life are widening, where, and what is happening to health at working ages.
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building mixedFrailty and multimorbidity at the oldest ages
Whether the years added after 85 are healthy ones, how frailty and multiple conditions are measured, and where the limits of the data lie.
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established mixedDiet and physical activity
What people eat and how much they move, what the measured evidence says each does to how long they live, and what has been shown to change either.
No papers yet -
contested mixedDementia
Whether dementia is becoming more or less common, what is found earlier and why that clouds the count, what treatment and prevention now do, and what the deaths say.
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building mixedCardiovascular disease
Whether deaths from heart disease and stroke have stopped falling, what is found earlier, what treatment and prevention now do, and what the deaths say.
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emerging strengtheningCapacity, funding and care
What waiting lists, workforce shortage and the slowing growth of health and care spending cost in lives & how societies are paying for and providing care for older people.
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emerging strengtheningBiotechnology against inherited risk and ageing
What are the benefits of genomic risk prediction, what gene therapies can now do and at what cost, and whether anything yet slows ageing itself.
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building strengtheningWhat changes behaviour at scale
What moves a population's behaviour — price, defaults, availability, incentives, information — and what the evidence on vaccination, screening and adherence says about which of them work.
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established mixedAlcohol, drugs and suicide
What is happening to deaths from alcohol, drugs and suicide, whether they move together, and how much of it is behaviour and how much circumstance.
No papers yet -
emerging strengtheningAI in medicine
Whether machine learning predicts, detects and decides better than the tools we have, and whether that has yet changed an outcome for a population.
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Item new preprint
PCV21 would prevent 1.5–1.7 times as many pneumococcal cases as PCV20 in Japan
Combining Japanese adult invasive pneumococcal disease surveillance with a multicentre pneumonia study, the authors estimate that PCV21 would prevent 1.5–1.7 times as many pneumococcal disease cases as PCV20 among adults aged 65 and over at current 40% coverage.
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Item refines preprint
Self-guided lipid app cut LDL-cholesterol by 3.9% more than usual care over six months
In a pragmatic online trial of 278 adults with LDL-cholesterol above their risk-adapted target, a fully self-guided lifestyle app added to usual care reduced LDL by 3.9% more than usual care alone at six months, with 41.7% versus 23.8% achieving a fall of at least 10%.
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Item new peer-reviewed
Fine particulate matter shows no association with ovarian cancer across pooled cohorts
A systematic review of 145 studies of environmental chemical exposures and gynaecologic cancers found no pooled association between PM2.5 and ovarian cancer (HR 1.02 per 5 µg/m³, 95% CI 0.91–1.13) and only a marginal one for endometrial cancer (HR 1.02, 95% CI 0.99–1.05).
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Item confirms preprint
Socioeconomic advantage tracks slower biological ageing across 12 European countries
In SHARE, three Klemera-Doubal biological-age measures predicted functional limitation, cognition and mortality, and every indicator of socioeconomic advantage was associated with lower age acceleration, though the size of the gradient differed markedly between countries.
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Item refines peer-reviewed
China's clean-heating pilots cut heating-season PM2.5 most in the pollution tails
An augmented synthetic control evaluation of 88 clean-heating pilot cities in northern China found heating-season PM2.5 fell by 3.01 \u00b5g/m\u00b3 on average but by 5.96 \u00b5g/m\u00b3 at the 99th percentile, with high-pollution days contributing almost half the modelled mortality difference.
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Item new peer-reviewed
Machine learning predicted six-month mortality after Taiwanese care-home admission
An ensemble machine learning model built only from routine intake assessments in 636 Taiwanese long-term care facilities predicted death within 180 days of first admission with an AUROC of 0.90 in a held-out 2024 cohort, where 28.7% of new residents died.
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Item new preprint
Weaker social ties before surgery track early death and non-home discharge, not survival
A meta-analysis of 445 surgical studies found weaker preoperative social connection associated with early postoperative mortality (OR 1.50, 95% CI 1.12-2.01) and non-home discharge (OR 1.95, 1.35-2.81), while the estimate for overall postoperative survival crossed the null.
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Item new preprint
GLP-1 initiators lost 2.75 points more skeletal muscle on repeat whole-body MRI
Among 58 adults with diabetes in the German National Cohort who started a GLP-1 receptor agonist between two whole-body MRI examinations 4.6 years apart, skeletal muscle volume fell 2.75 percentage points more than in 130 matched unexposed controls.
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Item new peer-reviewed
A Bayesian model extends excess-death estimation to six years, applied to New Zealand
A Bayesian hierarchical model fitted to 22 years of monthly deaths by age and sex extends expected-death estimation beyond the one-to-two-year horizon of standard methods, and in New Zealand finds few excess deaths during the pandemic and a return to pre-pandemic trends by 2025.
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Item new peer-reviewed
Biggest cardiometabolic treatment gaps are not where most risk could be averted
A pooled analysis of individual participant data from 76 countries found that the populations with the largest gaps in cardiometabolic treatment coverage were not those where treating the untreated would avert the most absolute cardiovascular risk, and that inequalities widened after diagnosis.
All items · Data watch · Revisions
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Releases this week
Next seven days: NCHS Deaths (Tue 22); ONS weekly deaths (Wed 23); NCHS Changes in Suicide Rates in the United States (Wed 23); UKHSA Cover of vaccination evaluated rapidly (COVER) programme 2026 to 2027 (Thu 24); UKHSA flu and COVID-19 surveillance (Thu 24); and 5 more. Full calendar