The Costa Rican population gained one year of healthy life, when compared to those who lived a decade ago.
Data from the University of Washington’s Institute Health Metrics included information from 195 nations around the world.
Jacqueline Castillo, one of the researchers of the project for Costa Rica, explained that this means that, on average, the population lives 71.1 healthy years, while 10 years ago it lived 70 years.
This indicator places the country next to some European nations and surpasses the condition of countries like the United States.
The results were obtained after combining mortality and disability data, generated by both diseases and violent acts. Among the latter are traffic accidents and those caused by assaults with firearms and weapons (homicides and suicides), as well as the abuse of psychoactive substances.
According to Castillo, this progress is the result of efforts to control some diseases such as respiratory diseases, congenital heart malformations, and asthma, as well as the improvement in prenatal, neonatal care, the management of preterm infants, the monitoring of diabetes, among others.
However, there is also a call for those situations and diseases that are causing the loss of healthy years of life. For example, violence, malignant tumors of breast, colon and rectum cancer, alcoholism, cirrhosis, drug addiction, Alzheimer’s, overweight and obesity, depression, dietary risk and mental and behavioral disorders.
Women are the ones who earn more years and men are the ones who lose more. In general, the Costa Rican population lost 950,601 healthy years of life, due to communicable diseases, injuries or non-transmissible maternal, neonatal and nutritional diseases.