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Official figures
Where the evidence stands
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building mixedThe sources behind the numbers
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building mixedForecasts and their track record
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 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.
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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.
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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 strengtheningWhat linked data reveals
What linked registries are making it possible to know about whole populations
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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.
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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.
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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
Varenicline users had about half the dementia risk of nicotine-replacement users
Among 3,516 propensity-matched adults aged 50 and over starting smoking cessation in the US All of Us cohort, varenicline was associated with a lower rate of incident Alzheimer's disease and related dementias than nicotine replacement (HR 0.52, 95% CI 0.35-0.75), in a preprint.
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Item new peer-reviewed
GLP-1 users with continuous glucose monitoring were more likely to stay on the drug
In US claims data on 4,681 adults with type 2 diabetes starting a GLP-1 receptor agonist, 68.4% of adherent continuous glucose monitor users were still on the drug at 12 months against 51.9% of matched non-users (adjusted hazard ratio for stopping 0.56).
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Item new preprint
Peer-derived fMRI neurofeedback during a film reduced craving in opioid use disorder
A real-time fMRI study trained people with opioid use disorder to align prefrontal activity with a signal derived from peers further into recovery watching the same film, and reported reduced craving against sham feedback, in a preprint that gives no sample size.
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Item confirms peer-reviewed
Families of children with cancer report debt and a lasting loss of household security
A meta-aggregation of 14 qualitative studies covering 524 participants, mostly parents of children with cancer in seven countries, found financial strain built from medical costs, lost earnings and thin insurance, with outside help and household reorganisation giving only partial relief.
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Item confirms peer-reviewed
A nutrition-inflammation index tracked short-term mortality in ICU kidney injury
In 1,887 critically ill adults with acute kidney injury in the MIMIC-IV database, a higher advanced lung cancer inflammation index was associated with lower in-hospital mortality (HR 0.86 per log unit) and lower 90-day mortality (HR 0.81), mainly in non-septic cases.
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Item new preprint
Varenicline users had about half the dementia risk of nicotine-replacement users
Among 3,516 propensity-matched adults aged 50 and over starting smoking cessation in the US All of Us cohort, varenicline was associated with a lower rate of incident Alzheimer's disease and related dementias than nicotine replacement (HR 0.52, 95% CI 0.35-0.75), in a preprint.
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Item new peer-reviewed
GLP-1 users with continuous glucose monitoring were more likely to stay on the drug
In US claims data on 4,681 adults with type 2 diabetes starting a GLP-1 receptor agonist, 68.4% of adherent continuous glucose monitor users were still on the drug at 12 months against 51.9% of matched non-users (adjusted hazard ratio for stopping 0.56).
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Item confirms peer-reviewed
Families of children with cancer report debt and a lasting loss of household security
A meta-aggregation of 14 qualitative studies covering 524 participants, mostly parents of children with cancer in seven countries, found financial strain built from medical costs, lost earnings and thin insurance, with outside help and household reorganisation giving only partial relief.
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Item confirms peer-reviewed
A nutrition-inflammation index tracked short-term mortality in ICU kidney injury
In 1,887 critically ill adults with acute kidney injury in the MIMIC-IV database, a higher advanced lung cancer inflammation index was associated with lower in-hospital mortality (HR 0.86 per log unit) and lower 90-day mortality (HR 0.81), mainly in non-septic cases.
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Item confirms peer-reviewed
Plasma GFAP separated Alzheimer's stages while vascular markers overlapped heavily
In 2650 ADNI participants, plasma GFAP was 56.3% higher in Alzheimer's dementia than in cognitively unimpaired people (AUC 0.82), while the vascular markers VEGF and sVCAM-1 differed by about 14% with more than 80% overlap (AUC 0.61 and 0.63).
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Item new peer-reviewed
A smartphone game with optional CBT beat a waitlist on symptoms and adherence
In 148 adults on antidepressants with residual symptoms, nine weeks of a CBT-based smartphone game with optional internet CBT improved depressive symptoms (d = 0.74) and medication adherence (d = 0.46) against a waitlist, though 40.8% of the intervention arm dropped out against 18.1% of controls.
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Item new peer-reviewed
Quit rates halved in Hong Kong cessation services after COVID restrictions began
Among 1762 adults using community smoking cessation services in Hong Kong, biochemically validated six-month abstinence fell from 12.3% before the January 2020 emergency response escalation to 6.8% after it, a risk ratio of 0.55.
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Item new preprint
The same naloxone increase is modelled to save six times more lives in one county
A simulation calibrated to six Pennsylvania counties projected that an identical 30% rise in naloxone distribution would cut 2029 overdose deaths by 70% in Allegheny but 11% in Erie, a difference tracking each county's past variability in dispensing rather than any observed outcome.
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Item refines peer-reviewed
Illicit cigarettes rose from 8.5% to 20.4% of packs in eight Mexican cities by 2023
A follow-up collection of 12,607 discarded cigarette packs in 11 Mexican cities put the illicit share at 18.2% in 2023, and in the eight cities surveyed in both years it rose from 8.5% in 2017 to 20.4%, with city-level estimates ranging from under 1% to 43.4%.
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Item refines peer-reviewed
Adolescent movement behaviours explained 2.0 points of a 6.9-point CVD risk gap
In 6,608 US adolescents followed for over two decades, the 6.9 percentage-point gap in predicted 30-year cardiovascular risk by parental education fell to 4.9 points in a scenario removing all unhealthy physical activity, screen time and sleep, and the relative gap was unchanged.
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Data new preprint
An Amish founder-population cohort links genomes and cognition in 3,978 older adults
The Collaborative Amish Aging and Memory Project has enrolled 3,978 older Amish adults in Ohio and Indiana, 2,928 with consensus-adjudicated cognitive status, alongside multigenerational pedigrees, whole-genome sequencing and plasma biomarkers, and reports no findings beyond its composition.
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Item new preprint
Bacteria in wastewater tracked community COVID-19 rates alongside viral load
A preprint reports that bacterial genera in wastewater, including gut commensals depleted during SARS-CoV-2 infection, tracked community COVID-19 case rates and predicted future rates slightly better than viral gene copies, though it gives no sample size or period.
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Item confirms peer-reviewed
Favourable lifestyle halved kidney stone incidence in 300,875 UK Biobank adults
Among 300,875 UK Biobank participants followed a median 12.3 years, 3,088 developed kidney stones, and those scoring favourably on seven lifestyle items had a hazard ratio of 0.51 (0.44 to 0.59) against the unfavourable group.
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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 refines preprint
Austrian registry data show vaccinated adults died less from causes vaccines cannot affect
In Austrian adults with no documented prior infection, vaccinated people had lower mortality from cancer and external causes, with adjusted all-cause hazard ratios of 0.24 to 0.32 in the two weeks after a dose, a measure of the healthy vaccinee effect.
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Item new preprint
Peer-derived fMRI neurofeedback during a film reduced craving in opioid use disorder
A real-time fMRI study trained people with opioid use disorder to align prefrontal activity with a signal derived from peers further into recovery watching the same film, and reported reduced craving against sham feedback, in a preprint that gives no sample size.
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Item confirms preprint
Gradient boosting did no better than logistic regression on HPV vaccine hesitancy
In 1,156 Cameroonian parents of children aged 9 to 18, XGBoost, random forest and logistic regression predicted HPV vaccine hesitancy almost identically (AUC 0.841-0.870, XGBoost 0.870 against 0.869, p=0.965), with logistic regression the best calibrated.
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Item confirms peer-reviewed
Telehealth-supported hepatitis C care was costed at 69% below specialist care
A cost model of the Cherokee Nation's hepatitis C ECHO telehealth programme put care at $1412 per patient against $4534 under conventional specialist care, on that one system's own accounts for 2016 to 2020.
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Item refines peer-reviewed
Shared genetic risk across cancers appears only in specific regions, not genome-wide
An analysis of 16 cancers plus a pan-cancer phenotype found only 20 genome-wide correlated cancer pairs but 82 genomic regions with shared local effects across 66 pairs, with cross-cancer polygenic score associations concentrated in immune and inflammatory pathways.
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Item refines peer-reviewed
Three Holter ECG markers with age predicted 5-year mortality at AUROC 0.79 in Israel
A random forest combining atrial fibrillation burden, premature ventricular contraction burden and T-wave alternans with age reached an AUROC of 0.79 for five-year all-cause mortality in 54,395 people recorded at Israeli primary care centres.
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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