The disease burden on our shoulders.

Abstract

You, the readers of these words, will on average live longer than your parents. But how many of you have devoted much thought to how healthy or ill you will be during those extra years of life? It is not in the nature of most of us to spend much time pondering questions of an existential nature, especially if they concern the distant future. Physicians, however, should take an interest in the medical implications of an extended life span for the population as a whole. The surveillance of disease burden takes on special importance in times of increasing life expectancy and changing age distribution of the population, and is the subject of the study by Dietrich Plass and his coauthors in this issue of Deutsches Arzteblatt International (1). The term “disease burden” is used here to mean the frequency, average age at onset, severity, and mortality of diseases with all their individual, social, and societal consequences. The disease burden of a whole population is therefore always considerable and is affected by demographic changes. It involves not only increasing or decreasing occurrence of single diseases but also significant shifts in the disease spectrum of a population, with implications for, to name just one example, the numbers of specialists needed in particular fields of medicine.