Global, regional, and national deaths, prevalence, disability-adjusted life years, and years lived with disability for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and asthma, 1990–2015

This new The Lancet Respiratory Medicine article presents a variety of statistics related to COPD and asthma gleaned from the 2015 Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors (GBD) study. The GBD was conducted from 1990 to 2015 and examined mortality, prevalence and a variety of other factors related to 310 disease states in nearly 200 countries worldwide. Of particular interest to the COPD community will be the following:

• 174.5 million people had COPD in 2015. This prevalence rate jumped 44.2 percent from 1990.
• In 2015, 3.2 million people in the international community died from COPD. This total was 11.6 percent higher than in 1990.
• Approximately 105 million males and 70 million females worldwide have COPD, or 3.2 percent of males and 2.0 percent of females.
• The study identified the highest COPD disability adjusted life years (or DALYs, which is a measure of the burden of disease in approximate years of life lost to poor health) in Papua New Guinea, India, Lesotho and Nepal; the lowest DALYs were in higher-income countries.
• Several regions, including high-income North America, had higher DALY rates in both sexes than would have been expected given their high sociodemographic index scores (i.e., scores based upon income, education and fertility rate).
• While asthma was twice as common than COPD in 2015, COPD mortality was eight times higher than it was for asthma.
• Smoking and ambient particulate matter, a certain type of air pollution, were the highest two risk factors for COPD DALYs.

Similar asthma-specific statistics are presented in detail. The authors discuss the limitations and implications of their work, including acknowledging that the GBD does not account for all risk factors related to COPD.