What are people dying from?
This question is essential to guide decisions in public health, and find ways to save lives.
Many leading causes of death receive little mainstream attention. If news reports reflected what children died from, they would say that around 1,400 young children die from diarrheal diseases, 1,000 die from malaria, and 1,900 from respiratory infections – every day.
This can change. Over time, death rates from these causes have declined across the world.
A better understanding of the causes of death has led to the development of technologies, preventative measures, and better healthcare, reducing the chances of dying from a wide range of different causes, across all age groups.
In the past, infectious diseases dominated. But death rates from infectious diseases have fallen quickly – faster than other causes. This has led to a shift in the leading causes of death. Now, non-communicable diseases – such as heart diseases and cancers – are the most common causes of death globally.
More progress is possible, and the impact of causes of death can fall further.
On this page, you will find global data and research on leading causes of death and how they can be prevented. This includes the number of people dying from each cause, their death rates, how they differ between age groups, and their trends over time.
This data can also help understand the burden of disease more broadly, and offer a lens to see the impacts of healthcare and medicine, habits and behaviours, environmental factors, health infrastructure, and more.
Related topics • Life expectancy • Child and infant mortality • Maternal mortality • Burden of disease
Key Insights on Causes of Death
Globally, non-communicable diseases are the most common causes of death
The chart shows what people died from globally, in 2019. Each box represents one cause, and its size is proportional to the number of deaths it caused.
The most common causes of death globally — shown in blue — were from ‘non-communicable diseases’.
This includes heart disease, cancer, and chronic respiratory diseases. They tend to develop gradually over time and aren’t infectious themselves.1
Heart diseases were the most common cause, responsible for a third of all deaths globally. Cancers were in second, causing almost one-in-five deaths. Taken together, heart diseases and cancers are the cause of every second death.
In red are infectious diseases, which are responsible for around 1-in-7 deaths. These include pneumonia, diarrheal diseases, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, and malaria.
A smaller share – around 4% – was from neonatal and maternal deaths. A similar share was from accidents.
Violent deaths were less common, with 1.3% dying from suicide and less than 1% dying from interpersonal violence such as homicide or battle deaths.
In this article, we cover this in more detail:
Causes of death globally: what do people die from?
To make progress towards a healthier world we need to have a good understanding of what health problems we face today.
What you should know about this data
- This data comes from the most recent publication of the Global Burden of Disease study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) in 2019 and the Global Terrorism Database.
- These estimates assign each death a single cause, based on data on the ‘underlying cause of death’ listed on death certificates, verbal autopsies, and statistical modeling. This is a simplification, as people often have multiple diseases or injuries that contribute to their death, which may also be listed on death certificates.
- This chart shows data on causes of death globally for 2019, the year before the Covid-19 pandemic started.
Tree map of causes of death globally in 2019, with non-communicable diseases in blue, communicable or infectious diseases in red, and injuries in green. The most common causes of deaths are non-communicable diseases such as heart diseases and cancers, while injuries and especially deaths from violence are rare.
Featured image for the article on causes of death globally. Stylized tree map with tiles of blue, red, and green.
