HHS HealthBeat (May 29, 2009)

Three ways to die too soon

From the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, I’m Ira Dreyfuss with HHS HealthBeat.

Why die too soon? Researchers have a new list of preventable causes of death. The top three: smoking, high blood pressure, and overweight or obesity.

At the Harvard School of Public Health, Majid Ezzati combined federal data on our health habits with other data on what happens to people with bad health habits:

[Majid Ezzati speaks] "They are responsible for something in the order of 1 to 5 deaths in U.S. adults for smoking, 1 in 6 for blood pressure and 1 out of every 10 deaths in the U.S. for overweight and obesity."

Ezzati says America has done some good for itself against smoking and blood pressure, but has a lot left to do on all three.

The study in the open-access journal PLoS Medicine was supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Learn more at hhs.gov.

HHS HealthBeat is a production of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. I’m Ira Dreyfuss.

Last revised: June, 01 2009