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People around the world are living almost as long as they did before the pandemic, but a growing share of those years is spent in poor health, according to the World Health Organization’s Global Health Estimates covering 2000 to 2023.
Global life expectancy reached 73.3 years in 2023, just below the 73.4 years recorded in 2019, before COVID-19 pushed mortality sharply higher. Healthy life expectancy, the number of years lived in full health, stood at 62.8 years. The gap between the two figures, roughly a decade, is the period many people spend living with illness or disability.
The data confirm a long-running shift in what kills people. Noncommunicable diseases such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes and chronic respiratory conditions now account for 74 percent of all deaths worldwide, up from 58 percent in 2000. The change reflects ageing populations and lifestyle risks including smoking, alcohol, poor diet and physical inactivity.
Ischaemic heart disease remains the single biggest cause of death, responsible for about 9.5 million deaths in the period covered. One of the starkest movements in the rankings involves dementia, which rose from the 19th leading cause of death in 2000 to the fifth, with deaths tripling over the period. Health experts link that rise both to longer lives and to better recognition of the condition.
COVID-19, which dominated mortality statistics at the height of the pandemic, has fallen out of the top 10 causes of death, the estimates show. Its retreat explains much of the recovery in overall life expectancy since 2021.
The WHO figures are estimates built from national records of very uneven quality, and the agency treats some country-level numbers with caution. Even so, the direction of travel is consistent across most regions: infectious diseases kill fewer people than they once did, while chronic conditions and dementia claim a steadily larger share.
For governments, the message is practical. Health systems designed mainly to treat infections and emergencies must increasingly manage long-term conditions over many years, and prevention aimed at hearts, lungs and brains earlier in life is likely to decide whether future gains in lifespan are matched by gains in healthy years.
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