Circulatory system diseases remain leading cause of deaths in 2023: Report

Circulatory system diseases were the leading cause of medically documented deaths across India in 2023, according to a report released this week by the Office of the Registrar General of India. These diseases accounted for 36.4% of all medically documented deaths in the country, according to RGI’s “2023 Annual Report on Medical Certification of Cause of Death.”

However, this figure was four percentage points lower than data reported in 2022, when more than 40% of certified deaths were due to these diseases.

The report looks at medically documented causes of death among the total deaths recorded across the country. The report stated that for 2023, 22% of all deaths registered in the Civil Registration System were medically documented; This rate was 0.3 points below the previous year (2022).

According to the report, circulatory system diseases are the leading cause of death in medically documented cases, with more than half of the deaths caused by pulmonary circulatory diseases or other heart diseases. The distribution by age showed that deaths due to circulatory system diseases were most common in people over the age of 70 and more than one third of the deaths were caused by these diseases. The group with the second highest number of deaths due to circulatory system diseases is people between the ages of 55 and 64.

However, the report stated that circulatory system diseases were the main reported cause of death in age groups starting from the age of 15.

This accounted for more than 21% of certified deaths in the 15-24 age group, the report said. The same was true for the age groups 25-34 years old (27.8%), 35-44 years old (33.1%) and over 45 years old. In fact, the report states that deaths from circulatory system diseases in people over the age of 45 represent more than 80% of such certified deaths in the country for 2023.

The release of the data comes at a time when academic journals have reported an increase in heart attacks among young people in India in the last two to three years.

In a recent report, Priyanka Paul et al. According to data from the Indian Heart Association, half of heart attacks in Indian men occur under the age of 50. While discussing certified deaths due to circulatory system diseases, the report said, “The age distribution under this cause group is consistent with the general epidemiology of Circulatory System Mortality increasing with age.”

According to data on circulatory system deaths, the number of women who die from such diseases in the age group of 70 years and above is over 10 percent higher than men. However, in all other age groups, the incidence of deaths due to these diseases was similar in both genders or less in women than in men.

It was also noted that the next most common cause of death was respiratory diseases, which contributed to just over 11.5% of all medically documented deaths in that year. Other common causes of death listed in the report include infectious and parasitic diseases, which are responsible for more than 8% of all certified deaths.

Conditions arising during the perinatal period, along with causes such as digestive tract diseases, neoplasms, genitourinary tract diseases, injuries and external factors, accounted for approximately 4% each of the total medically confirmed deaths in India in 2023. The report also stated that approximately 11.9% of certified deaths were due to symptoms, signs and abnormal clinical findings not elsewhere classified.

The report also noted that medical certification of causes of death occurs at different levels of efficiency in different States and UTs, noting that only Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Chandigarh, Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu, Delhi, Goa, Lakshadweep and Puducherry have medically certified more than half of the registered deaths.

Among these, Goa is the only state that has managed to report 100% medical certification of all registered deaths across the country.