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IHME faculty contribute articles to The Lancet’s series on health in Japan
News Release
August 30, 2011 – IHME faculty contributed articles to The Lancet’s special series on health in Japan, published August 30, 2011. The series focuses on the major achievements of Japan’s health system over the past 50 years, as well as its current and future challenges, including Japan’s aging population and the crises triggered by the earthquake in March.
A Comment by Dr. Christopher Murray, Director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) and Professor of Global Health at the University of Washington, notes that while Japan experienced huge reductions in mortality in the 1950s and 1960s, since 1995 Japan’s pace of declining mortality for adult men has fallen behind Sweden, Italy, and Australia, and for adult women, the pace of declining mortality has fallen behind Sweden.
In the Comment, Why is Japanese life expectancy so high?, Dr. Murray says there may be many explanations for Japan’s worsening performance relative to other countries, including high tobacco consumption, a modest rise in body mass index, and high and rising rates of suicide. He also points out that while Japan has a universal health care system, the quality of the care delivered might be low.
Dr. Murray concludes by noting that Japan’s current health challenges require concerted action, and the situation in Japan may serve as “a cautionary tale that success in the past does not guarantee top performance in the future.”
IHME Associate Professor, Dr. Mohsen Naghavi, co-authored an article also featured in this series that explores factors that have contributed to Japan’s success in population health over the past 50 years. The article, What has made the population of Japan healthy?, compiles the best evidence about Japan’s population health to see how Japan has maintained the longest life expectancy at birth in the world.
While initially this longevity was contributed to rapid reduction in mortality rates for communicable diseases, improvement has continued through the implementation of preventative community public health measures and increases in advanced technology. Japan will need to focus on tackling major health challenges in the future with a rapidly aging population with increasing social disparities
The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) is an independent global research center at the University of Washington providing sound measurement of population health and the factors that determine health, as well as rigorous evaluation of health system and health program performance. The Institute’s goal is to improve population health by providing the best evidence possible to guide health policy – and by making that evidence easily accessible to decision-makers as they strategically fund, design, and implement programs to improve health outcomes worldwide. IHME was created in 2007 through funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the state of Washington.
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