The burden of premature mortality among older adults: a population-based study in Malaysia

Yee Mang Chan · Shubash Shander Ganapathy · LeeAnn Tan · Nazirah Alias · Nur Hamizah Nasaruddin · Wan-Fei Khaw

14 citations0/0 files storedBMC Public Health

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Insurance, Mortality, Demography, Risk Management Healthcare Systems and Public Health Global Health and Epidemiology

Abstract

BACKGROUND: The populations of many countries-including Malaysia-are rapidly growing older, causing a shift in leading causes of disease and death. In such rapidly ageing populations, it is critical to monitor trends in burden of disease and health of older adults by identifying the leading causes of premature mortality and measuring years of life lost (YLL) to these. The objective of this study, therefore, is to describe the burden (quantified by YLL) associated with major causes of premature mortality among older adults in Malaysia in 2019. METHODS: All deaths that occurred in older adults aged 60 and above in Malaysia in the year 2019 were included in this study. YLL was calculated by summing the number of deaths for the disease category at 5-year age intervals, multiplied by the remaining life expectancy for the specific age and sex group. Both life expectancy and mortality data were obtained from the Department of Statistics Malaysia. RESULTS: In 2019, older adults accounted for 67.4% of total deaths in Malaysia (117,102 out of 173,746). The total number of YLL among older adults in Malaysia in 2019 was estimated at 1.36 million YLL, accounting for 39.6% of the total YLL (3.44 million) lost to all premature deaths in that year. The major causes of premature mortality among older adults were ischaemic heart disease (29.5%) followed by cerebrovascular disease (stroke) (20.8%), lower respiratory infections (15.9%), diabetes mellitus (8.1%) and trachea, bronchus and lung cancers (5.0%). CONCLUSIONS: Non-communicable diseases (NCD) remained the largest contributor to premature mortality among older adults in Malaysia. Implementation of population-level NCD health promotion programmes, screening programmes among high-risk groups and holistic intervention programmes among populations living with NCD are critical in reducing the overall burden of premature mortality.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 14 citations exist upstream.

References

2020Population ageing and mortality during 1990–2017: A global decomposition analysis 2017Identifying mechanisms for facilitating knowledge to action strategies targeting the built environment 2011The burden of premature mortality in Spain using standard expected years of life lost: a population-based study 2013Quantifying the burden of disease due to premature mortality in Hong Kong using standard expected years of life lost 2017Validation of verbal autopsy: determination of cause of deaths in Malaysia 2013

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.