Harmful drinking, that can lead to liver disease, is amongst the top causes of death in the UK. Image by Pixabay.
Harmful drinking, that can lead to liver disease, is amongst the top causes of death in the UK. Image by Pixabay.

The UK’s nation needs a “call to action”, as thousands of people could avoid an early death.

There is a lot of attention devoted to encourage people into improving their diet and lifestyle, yet still one in three deaths in the UK are among under-75s and over a third of these early deaths is caused by avoidable diseases:

  1. Cancer

According to the Office of National Statistics cancer accounted for nearly a third of all deaths registered in the UK in 2014.

The illness has become so common, that today one in 30 people living in Britain either has cancer, or finds themselves in the high risk group.

Despite the survival rates in the UK improving, Britain still falls behind other European countries.

Cancer Research UK states, that about a third of cancers is caused by smoking, bad diet, alcohol and obesity.

 

  1. Heart diseases

Almost 74,000 deaths each year are caused by this big killer. More than a quarter of the deaths occur among under-75 year olds and majority of them is preventable.

Main reasons of heart diseases in the UK are smoking, obesity and high blood pressure.

 

  1. Stroke

Stroke is the third leading cause of death in the UK and the main cause for disability. Every year more than 150,000 people have a stroke.

However, according to the Stroke Association, up to 10,000 of those could be prevented if only more people were aware of the symptoms and knew how to perform the emergency treatment.  

 

  1. Respiratory diseases

The main two ones are asthma and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD).

UK has one of the highest rates of asthma occurrence in the world. The Asthma UK analysis revealed that over 5.4 million people suffer from it and on average three people a day die from it.

COPD is a lounge disease caused mainly by smoking, but also by exposure to fumes and chemicals.  The illness kills around 23,000 people a year, from which the number of premature deaths is almost twice as high as the European average.

 

  1. Liver diseases

The fifth killer remains the only major cause of death still increasing each year. Between the year 2000 and 2013 the number of deaths among under-65s has increased by one third.

The major causes for liver diseases – obesity, undiagnosed infection and harmful drinking – are preventable.

By Natalia Szczepanek