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Affiliation
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Guangdong Provincial Institute of Public Health, Guangdong Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Guangzhou, 511430, China; General Practice Center, Nanhai Hospital, Southern Medical University, Foshan, China. |
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Abstract
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Injury is the fifth leading cause of death in China and results in more than 500 000 deaths and 12·6 million years of life lost annually. However, no studies have comprehensively measured the spatiotemporal variation in the injury burden at the national and subnational levels. Such studies could help policymakers to formulate strategies to prevent, control, and reduce the burden of injury.
In the Lancet Public Health, Duan Leilei and colleagues present a nationwide study that comprehensively assesses the burden of injury in China in 2017 and reveals changes in injury burden, including morbidity and mortality for both sexes and all age groups, from 1990 to 2017 based on data from the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) 2017. They report that the age-standardised incidence rate of injuries have increased in the past three decades, whereas rates of cause-specific mortality and disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) have been declining, although substantial spatiotemporal heterogeneity in age-standardised injury DALYs was observed at the province level. The key message of this study is that injury prevention and control measures have made strides over the past three decades in China. Nevertheless, the upward trend of injury incidence and imbalance of injury burden at the province level indicates that injury prevention and control remain a priority in China.
With the rapid economic development of the country, the Chinese Government has introduced surveillance, education, legislation, and relevant enforcement to reduce the cause-specific burden of injury.
These efforts have largely improved the conditions of employment, availability and coverage of medical and public health services, quality of infrastructure, law enforcement, and injury prevention awareness among the general population, resulting in the large reduction in injury burden observed in the study.
Nevertheless, the same rapid socioeconomic development might have caused the increase in injury incidence in the first place by accelerating the processes of motorisation and industrialisation.
If this is the case, these trends suggest that China, given its continuing motorisation and industrialisation, should continue to reduce injury mortality and increase its efforts in safeguarding against future injury incidence...
Language: en |