Health problems ‘affect 95 percent of global population’

Only 4.3 percent of the world's population were living without any kind of health problem as of 2013, according to the latest Global Burden of Disease Study.

A new analysis of the global study has published in The Lancet, revealing that one-third of the world's population – or 2.3 billion individuals – experience more than five ailments, while the proportion of lost years of healthy life due to illness rose from 21 percent in 1990 to 31 percent in 2013.

The study warned that as the world's population grows and the proportion of elderly people increases, the number of people living in poor health will rise rapidly over the coming decades.

It was also shown that the leading causes of health loss have hardly changed in the past 23 years, with low back pain, depression, iron-deficiency anaemia, neck pain and age-related hearing loss all continuing to rank highly.

Theo Vos, lead author and professor of global health at the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, said this represents "further evidence of the importance of paying attention to the rising health loss from these leading causes of disability, and not simply focusing on reducing mortality".