Nations within a nation: variations in epidemiological transition across the states of India, 1990–2016 in the Global Burden of Disease Study

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Summary

Background

18% of the world's population lives in India, and many states of India have populations similar to those of large countries. Action to effectively improve population health in India requires availability of reliable and comprehensive state-level estimates of disease burden and risk factors over time. Such comprehensive estimates have not been available so far for all major diseases and risk factors. Thus, we aimed to estimate the disease burden and risk factors in every state of India as part of the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) Study 2016.

Methods

Using all available data sources, the India State-level Disease Burden Initiative estimated burden (metrics were deaths, disability-adjusted life-years [DALYs], prevalence, incidence, and life expectancy) from 333 disease conditions and injuries and 84 risk factors for each state of India from 1990 to 2016 as part of GBD 2016. We divided the states of India into four epidemiological transition level (ETL) groups on the basis of the ratio of DALYs from communicable, maternal, neonatal, and nutritional diseases (CMNNDs) to those from non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and injuries combined in 2016. We assessed variations in the burden of diseases and risk factors between ETL state groups and between states to inform a more specific health-system response in the states and for India as a whole.

Findings

DALYs due to NCDs and injuries exceeded those due to CMNNDs in 2003 for India, but this transition had a range of 24 years for the four ETL state groups. The age-standardised DALY rate dropped by 36·2% in India from 1990 to 2016. The numbers of DALYs and DALY rates dropped substantially for most CMNNDs between 1990 and 2016 across all ETL groups, but rates of reduction for CMNNDs were slowest in the low ETL state group. By contrast, numbers of DALYs increased substantially for NCDs in all ETL state groups, and increased significantly for injuries in all ETL state groups except the highest. The all-age prevalence of most leading NCDs increased substantially in India from 1990 to 2016, and a modest decrease was recorded in the age-standardised NCD DALY rates. The major risk factors for NCDs, including high systolic blood pressure, high fasting plasma glucose, high total cholesterol, and high body-mass index, increased from 1990 to 2016, with generally higher levels in higher ETL states; ambient air pollution also increased and was highest in the low ETL group. The incidence rate of the leading causes of injuries also increased from 1990 to 2016. The five leading individual causes of DALYs in India in 2016 were ischaemic heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, diarrhoeal diseases, lower respiratory infections, and cerebrovascular disease; and the five leading risk factors for DALYs in 2016 were child and maternal malnutrition, air pollution, dietary risks, high systolic blood pressure, and high fasting plasma glucose. Behind these broad trends many variations existed between the ETL state groups and between states within the ETL groups. Of the ten leading causes of disease burden in India in 2016, five causes had at least a five-times difference between the highest and lowest state-specific DALY rates for individual causes.

Interpretation

Per capita disease burden measured as DALY rate has dropped by about a third in India over the past 26 years. However, the magnitude and causes of disease burden and the risk factors vary greatly between the states. The change to dominance of NCDs and injuries over CMNNDs occurred about a quarter century apart in the four ETL state groups. Nevertheless, the burden of some of the leading CMNNDs continues to be very high, especially in the lowest ETL states. This comprehensive mapping of inequalities in disease burden and its causes across the states of India can be a crucial input for more specific health planning for each state as is envisioned by the Government of India's premier think tank, the National Institution for Transforming India, and the National Health Policy 2017.

Funding

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Indian Council of Medical Research, Department of Health Research, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India; and World Bank

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Most cited references 16

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Global, regional, and national under-5 mortality, adult mortality, age-specific mortality, and life expectancy, 1970–2016: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2016

Yuan-Pang Wang, Maheswar Satpathy, Elisabete Weiderpass … (2017)

Summary Background Detailed assessments of mortality patterns, particularly age-specific mortality, represent a crucial input that enables health systems to target interventions to specific populations. Understanding how all-cause mortality has changed with respect to development status can identify exemplars for best practice. To accomplish this, the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2016 (GBD 2016) estimated age-specific and sex-specific all-cause mortality between 1970 and 2016 for 195 countries and territories and at the subnational level for the five countries with a population greater than 200 million in 2016. Methods We have evaluated how well civil registration systems captured deaths using a set of demographic methods called death distribution methods for adults and from consideration of survey and census data for children younger than 5 years. We generated an overall assessment of completeness of registration of deaths by dividing registered deaths in each location-year by our estimate of all-age deaths generated from our overall estimation process. For 163 locations, including subnational units in countries with a population greater than 200 million with complete vital registration (VR) systems, our estimates were largely driven by the observed data, with corrections for small fluctuations in numbers and estimation for recent years where there were lags in data reporting (lags were variable by location, generally between 1 year and 6 years). For other locations, we took advantage of different data sources available to measure under-5 mortality rates (U5MR) using complete birth histories, summary birth histories, and incomplete VR with adjustments; we measured adult mortality rate (the probability of death in individuals aged 15–60 years) using adjusted incomplete VR, sibling histories, and household death recall. We used the U5MR and adult mortality rate, together with crude death rate due to HIV in the GBD model life table system, to estimate age-specific and sex-specific death rates for each location-year. Using various international databases, we identified fatal discontinuities, which we defined as increases in the death rate of more than one death per million, resulting from conflict and terrorism, natural disasters, major transport or technological accidents, and a subset of epidemic infectious diseases; these were added to estimates in the relevant years. In 47 countries with an identified peak adult prevalence for HIV/AIDS of more than 0·5% and where VR systems were less than 65% complete, we informed our estimates of age-sex-specific mortality using the Estimation and Projection Package (EPP)-Spectrum model fitted to national HIV/AIDS prevalence surveys and antenatal clinic serosurveillance systems. We estimated stillbirths, early neonatal, late neonatal, and childhood mortality using both survey and VR data in spatiotemporal Gaussian process regression models. We estimated abridged life tables for all location-years using age-specific death rates. We grouped locations into development quintiles based on the Socio-demographic Index (SDI) and analysed mortality trends by quintile. Using spline regression, we estimated the expected mortality rate for each age-sex group as a function of SDI. We identified countries with higher life expectancy than expected by comparing observed life expectancy to anticipated life expectancy on the basis of development status alone. Findings Completeness in the registration of deaths increased from 28% in 1970 to a peak of 45% in 2013; completeness was lower after 2013 because of lags in reporting. Total deaths in children younger than 5 years decreased from 1970 to 2016, and slower decreases occurred at ages 5–24 years. By contrast, numbers of adult deaths increased in each 5-year age bracket above the age of 25 years. The distribution of annualised rates of change in age-specific mortality rate differed over the period 2000 to 2016 compared with earlier decades: increasing annualised rates of change were less frequent, although rising annualised rates of change still occurred in some locations, particularly for adolescent and younger adult age groups. Rates of stillbirths and under-5 mortality both decreased globally from 1970. Evidence for global convergence of death rates was mixed; although the absolute difference between age-standardised death rates narrowed between countries at the lowest and highest levels of SDI, the ratio of these death rates—a measure of relative inequality—increased slightly. There was a strong shift between 1970 and 2016 toward higher life expectancy, most noticeably at higher levels of SDI. Among countries with populations greater than 1 million in 2016, life expectancy at birth was highest for women in Japan, at 86·9 years (95% UI 86·7–87·2), and for men in Singapore, at 81·3 years (78·8–83·7) in 2016. Male life expectancy was generally lower than female life expectancy between 1970 and 2016, and the gap between male and female life expectancy increased with progression to higher levels of SDI. Some countries with exceptional health performance in 1990 in terms of the difference in observed to expected life expectancy at birth had slower progress on the same measure in 2016. Interpretation Globally, mortality rates have decreased across all age groups over the past five decades, with the largest improvements occurring among children younger than 5 years. However, at the national level, considerable heterogeneity remains in terms of both level and rate of changes in age-specific mortality; increases in mortality for certain age groups occurred in some locations. We found evidence that the absolute gap between countries in age-specific death rates has declined, although the relative gap for some age-sex groups increased. Countries that now lead in terms of having higher observed life expectancy than that expected on the basis of development alone, or locations that have either increased this advantage or rapidly decreased the deficit from expected levels, could provide insight into the means to accelerate progress in nations where progress has stalled. Funding Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the National Institute on Aging and the National Institute of Mental Health of the National Institutes of Health.

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Chronic diseases and injuries in India.

Vikram Patel, Somnath Chatterji, Dan Chisholm … (2011)

Chronic diseases (eg, cardiovascular diseases, mental health disorders, diabetes, and cancer) and injuries are the leading causes of death and disability in India, and we project pronounced increases in their contribution to the burden of disease during the next 25 years. Most chronic diseases are equally prevalent in poor and rural populations and often occur together. Although a wide range of cost-effective primary and secondary prevention strategies are available, their coverage is generally low, especially in poor and rural populations. Much of the care for chronic diseases and injuries is provided in the private sector and can be very expensive. Sufficient evidence exists to warrant immediate action to scale up interventions for chronic diseases and injuries through private and public sectors; improved public health and primary health-care systems are essential for the implementation of cost-effective interventions. We strongly advocate the need to strengthen social and policy frameworks to enable the implementation of interventions such as taxation on bidis (small hand-rolled cigarettes), smokeless tobacco, and locally brewed alcohols. We also advocate the integration of national programmes for various chronic diseases and injuries with one another and with national health agendas. India has already passed the early stages of a chronic disease and injury epidemic; in view of the implications for future disease burden and the demographic transition that is in progress in India, the rate at which effective prevention and control is implemented should be substantially increased. The emerging agenda of chronic diseases and injuries should be a political priority and central to national consciousness, if universal health care is to be achieved. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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Using verbal autopsy to measure causes of death: the comparative performance of existing methods

Christopher Murray, Rafael Lozano, Abraham Flaxman … (2014)

Background Monitoring progress with disease and injury reduction in many populations will require widespread use of verbal autopsy (VA). Multiple methods have been developed for assigning cause of death from a VA but their application is restricted by uncertainty about their reliability. Methods We investigated the validity of five automated VA methods for assigning cause of death: InterVA-4, Random Forest (RF), Simplified Symptom Pattern (SSP), Tariff method (Tariff), and King-Lu (KL), in addition to physician review of VA forms (PCVA), based on 12,535 cases from diverse populations for which the true cause of death had been reliably established. For adults, children, neonates and stillbirths, performance was assessed separately for individuals using sensitivity, specificity, Kappa, and chance-corrected concordance (CCC) and for populations using cause specific mortality fraction (CSMF) accuracy, with and without additional diagnostic information from prior contact with health services. A total of 500 train-test splits were used to ensure that results are robust to variation in the underlying cause of death distribution. Results Three automated diagnostic methods, Tariff, SSP, and RF, but not InterVA-4, performed better than physician review in all age groups, study sites, and for the majority of causes of death studied. For adults, CSMF accuracy ranged from 0.764 to 0.770, compared with 0.680 for PCVA and 0.625 for InterVA; CCC varied from 49.2% to 54.1%, compared with 42.2% for PCVA, and 23.8% for InterVA. For children, CSMF accuracy was 0.783 for Tariff, 0.678 for PCVA, and 0.520 for InterVA; CCC was 52.5% for Tariff, 44.5% for PCVA, and 30.3% for InterVA. For neonates, CSMF accuracy was 0.817 for Tariff, 0.719 for PCVA, and 0.629 for InterVA; CCC varied from 47.3% to 50.3% for the three automated methods, 29.3% for PCVA, and 19.4% for InterVA. The method with the highest sensitivity for a specific cause varied by cause. Conclusions Physician review of verbal autopsy questionnaires is less accurate than automated methods in determining both individual and population causes of death. Overall, Tariff performs as well or better than other methods and should be widely applied in routine mortality surveillance systems with poor cause of death certification practices.

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Author and article information

Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): Lancet

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): Lancet

Title: Lancet (London, England)

Publisher: Elsevier

ISSN (Print): 0140-6736

ISSN (Electronic): 1474-547X

Publication date PMC-release: 02 December 2017

Publication date (Print): 02 December 2017

Volume: 390

Issue: 10111

Pages: 2437-2460

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Article

Publisher ID: S0140-6736(17)32804-0

DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(17)32804-0

PMC ID: 5720596

PubMed ID: 29150201

SO-VID: 1f7f7675-0c8d-47f9-9ba3-b7958e3e5d3e

License:

This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Nations within a nation: variations in epidemiological transition across the states of India, 1990–2016 in the Global Burden of Disease Study

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Most cited references 16

Global, regional, and national under-5 mortality, adult mortality, age-specific mortality, and life expectancy, 1970–2016: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2016

Chronic diseases and injuries in India.

Using verbal autopsy to measure causes of death: the comparative performance of existing methods

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