43% of the population worldwide suffers from neurological diseases

Neurologics are a bigger problem worldwide than it has been realized so far, since the rates have increased and apparently affect 43% of it. According to a study by “The Lancet Neurology”, 43% of the world’s population, i.e. about 3.4 billion people in 2021, is burdened with various neurological diseases. It is estimated that neurological diseases were responsible for 443 million years of healthy life lost due to illness, disability and premature death in 2021, which makes them the leading factor contributing to the global burden of diseases, in front of cardiovascular diseases. In fact, the number has increased significantly over the last 30 years due to an increase in world population ageing, as well as increased exposure to environmental and metabolic risk factors, as well as life-style risk factors. The main factors of loss of neurological health worldwide were stroke, neonatal encephalopathy, migraine, Alzheimer’s disease and other types of dementia, diabetic neuropathy, meningitis, epilepsy, neurological complications from premature delivery, autism spectrum disorder, and nervous system cancers. Covid-19’s neurological consequences took 20th place representing 2.48 million years of healthy life lost in 2021. The most widespread neurological disorders in 2021 were voltage-type headaches (about 2 billion cases) and migraines (about 1.1 billion cases). Diabetic neuropathy is the fastest growing of all neurological diseases, as the number of people with this disease has more than tripled worldwide from 1990 to 2021. Overall, neurodevelopmental and paediatric diseases are estimated to be responsible for almost one fifth of the total neurological burden worldwide, equivalent to 80 million lost years of healthy life in 2021. Writers stress that according to 2017 figures, only a quarter of countries worldwide had a separate budget for neurological diseases and only about half had clinical guidelines. In addition, medical staff caring for people with neurological diseases are unequally distributed around the world, with high-income countries having 70 times more professional neurologists per 100,000 than low-income countries. It is noted that areas with the highest burden of the nervous system in 2021 were central and western sub-Saharan Africa, while the lowest burden was Asia-Pacific and Australasia. Finally, the analysis suggests that the modification of 18 risk factors during a person’s life, with more importantly high systolic blood pressure, could prevent 84% of the years lost due to the disease worldwide. Also, control of lead exposure could reduce the burden of mental disability by 63%, while reducing fasting high glucose plasma to normal levels could reduce the burden of dementia by about 15%.