The Crucible

Where is cancer incidence rising and falling, what screening and new tests find earlier, and what treatment has done to survival.

Are obesity and diabetes still rising, what behavioural change and public policy do, and what difference do GLP-1s and other similar drugs make.

Whether deaths from heart disease and stroke have stopped falling, what is found earlier, what treatment and prevention do now, and what the deaths say.

Deaths by suicide, the life expectancy gap in severe mental illness, and the physical disease that follows it: what mental illness costs in lives.

Whether dementia is becoming more or less common, what is now found, what treatment and prevention do, and what the deaths say.

Whether the years added after 85 are healthy ones, how frailty and multiple conditions are measured, and where the data run out.

What people eat and how much they move: what the measured evidence says each does to mortality, and what has been shown to change either.

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.

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.

Isolation, loneliness and mortality: what the evidence shows, how far the relationship is causal, and what interventions have shown.

Infection and pandemics: the risks, and how well prepared we are

Whether a treatment is actually taken, for how long, and what changes either.

How the forecasts are made, how well they explained the past, and how well mortality can be forecast — and by whom.

What linked registries make it possible to know about whole populations

Whether machine learning predicts, detects and decides better than the tools we have, and whether that has yet changed an outcome for a population.

What the health system can provide, who gets it, and whether the gaps in health between groups are widening.

What a treatment, health programme or policy is worth against what it costs, and how far the models that decide it can be trusted.

What the figures are built from, what is newly available, and how much the numbers move when they are revised.

Treatments that did not exist before — drugs, operations, devices — and whether they reach the people who would benefit.

Whether new technology can change what people do at the scale of a population: apps, wearables, automated messages, digital programmes and platforms, and how far their effects last and reach.

What wearables, remote monitoring and care at home add to how health is measured and delivered, and whether it shows in outcomes.

How air pollution, heat and cold affect deaths and survival, how the attribution is made, and how the balance is changing.

Whether anything yet slows ageing itself, rather than treating one disease at a time, and how we would know if it did.