This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science.

I'm Steve Mursky.

Back in 2011, member countries of the World Health Organization, the WHO, came up with a plan to cut mortality from non-communicable diseases

25% by the year 2025.

The program was thus called the 25 by 25 initiative, and it identified various health risk factors, such as smoking,

high blood pressure, diabetes, and a sedentary lifestyle.

What the initiative did not include as a risk factor for poor health was poverty.

An international team of researchers thus decided to look at poverty as a possible driver of

non-communicable illness.

They poured over data from 48 previously published studies that included socioeconomic information.

Together, those studies included some 1.75 million subjects from seven high-income

countries in the WHO, and the research team found that being poor was more

dangerous than obesity or high alcohol intake.

The studies in the journal The Lancet.

The results were reported in terms of years of life lost between the ages of 40 and 85. Being a current smoker was associated with 4.8

years of lost life, diabetes with 3.9 years, and physical inactivity with 2.4 years.

Being of low socioeconomic status was almost as bad as inactivity with 2.1 years of lost life.

High blood pressure only accounted for 1.1 years of lost life. High blood pressure only accounted for 1.6 years lost and high

alcohol intake was good for, or bad for, 0.5 years gone. Because of these findings, the researchers wrote that the results, quote,

suggest that socioeconomic circumstances

should be treated as a target for local and global health strategies,

health risk surveillance, interventions, and policy."

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