Poor diet and physical inactivity may soon overtake tobacco as leading cause of dea...( NOTE: The embargo for the following ...)

Poor diet and physical inactivity may soon overtake tobacco as leading cause of death in U.S.

NOTE: The embargo for the following JAMA news release, "Poor Diet and Physical Inactivity May Soon Overtake Tobacco As Leading Cause of Death In U.S.", has been changed to 2 p.m. (ET), Tuesday, March 9, 2004, to coincide with a news conference being held by HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson and CDC Director Dr. Julie Gerberding, one of the authors of the JAMA study. The news conference will release the findings of the JAMA study and launch a new campaign on healthy living. The JAMA news release follows.

About half of all deaths in the U.S. can be attributed to largely preventable behaviors and exposures, with tobacco use and poor diet/physical inactivity accounting for the majority of preventable deaths, according to a study in the March 10 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

According to background information in the article, quantifying modifiable behavioral risk factors, which are the leading causes of death in the United States, will provide insight into the effects of recent trends and indicate missed prevention opportunities.

Ali H. Mokdad, Ph.D., and colleagues from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, conducted a study to identify and quantify the leading causes of death in the United States. The study included a comprehensive MEDLINE search of English-language articles that identified epidemiological, clinical, and laboratory studies linking risk behaviors and mortality (death). Prevalence and relative risk were identified during the literature search. The researchers used 2000 mortality data reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to identify the causes and number of deaths. The estimates of actual cause of death were computed by multiplying estimates of the cause-attributable fraction of preventable deaths with the total mortality data.

The researchers found that the leading causes of death in 2000 were tobacco (435,000 deaths;
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Contact: Llewyn Grant
770-488-5131
JAMA and Archives Journals
9-Mar-2004

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