Identifying health problems of the future
It wasn’t that long ago that we knew very little about the state of people’s health around the world. NTNU’s new honorary doctors have used 300,000 sources to provide us with an overview.
Planning for the future of a society requires a lot of facts. We need to know how long people enjoy good health, how many people have disabilities, how many people sustain injuries, what makes us sick, what we die from, and not least, how many of us there will be.
We need this information to work out how many people will require care, how many people will be able to work, and how many children will need schools. Only then can governments around the world plan future health, welfare and education systems.
However, this requires huge volumes of data gathered from every corner of the world. We must also have accurate measurement methods that can process different types of data. An impossible task, you might think.
Yet it turns out it can be done.
Much of the credit goes to our new honorary doctors
Emmanuela Gakidou and Christopher J.L. Murray are NTNU’s new honorary doctors. Photo: Private
Christopher J. L. Murray and Emmanuela Gakidou are NTNU’s latest honorary doctors. Much of the credit for the establishment of a global monitoring system for health and risk factors must go to them.
“Gakidou and Murray have played key roles in the most comprehensive mapping of global public health ever,” said Professor Terje Andreas Eikemo from the Department of Sociology and Political Science.
He and Professor Steinar Krokstad at the HUNT Research Centre nominated the two researchers as new honorary doctors. On 15 November, Gakidou and Murray will be in Trondheim to receive the honour.
“Murray was one of the speakers at The Big Challenge science festival in Trondheim in 2019. He was introduced as ‘the world’s most famous doctor’,” said Eikemo.
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Over 30 years of health data experience
The mapping of the world’s health didn’t truly begin until 1991. It was at this time that the World Bank discovered that there was a lack of adequate statistics on what people were dying from around the world. The World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO) started the work of gathering such data.
Murray and Gakidou have been involved since the founding of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington, and organize the now well-known and influential Global Burden of Disease, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (the GBD Study).
Data from GBD have been used by many countries and health officials during the COVID-19 pandemic. Photo: Colourbox
“The purpose of the GBD Study is to provide the world with up-to-date, relevant and scientifically robust health data worldwide, so that they are reliable enough to make decisions about health policy and healthcare practices,” said Eikemo.
Politicians and other decision makers from many countries now use the data from this global study when planning for the future. The study is the largest of its kind in the world.
“Murray is the architect behind the GBD Study and its director. Gakidou leads the development of the organization and the training of the next generation of leaders in the field who collect, organize and evaluate health data,” Eikemo explained.
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Honorary doctors behind the world’s largest health collaboration
Obtaining such high-quality data clearly requires skilled partners around the world, and Eikemo is one of them. He is the leader of CHAIN, a research centre at NTNU that studies how social health inequalities can be reduced.
“The GBD Study has experienced significant growth since it began. The latest update for 2021 is based on more than 300,000 data sources. The HUNT Study is one of the sources that the study uses,” said Krokstad.
The GBD Study currently involves over 13,000 researchers and decision-makers in over 160 countries.
“GBD 2021 provides an overview of 88 risk factors and 371 different health outcomes, categorized according to gender and age in 204 countries and 811 national regions,” said Eikemo.
A clear candidate for the Nobel Prize
For example, the data were used as a reliable source in connection with the COVID-19 outbreak by the White House, the EU Commission, and many governments in Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and Europe. Data from the study are also used by regional organizations such as the WHO, the Pan American Health Organization and the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.
Chris Murray attended NTNU’s research festival The Big Challenge in Trondheim in 2019. Photo: Thor Nielsen, NTNU
Krokstad and Eikemo believe that the GBD Study is a clear candidate for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in the next decade.
Murray has been on Time Magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world and has received numerous awards and honours. He has a background from Oxford and Harvard universities and was employed at the WHO when he began working on the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME). Murray has been cited half a million times by other researchers.
Gakidou’s background is also from Harvard and the WHO. She has been involved in many different research projects focusing on global health and global inequalities. A few years ago, one of her most famous and encouraging studies showed that the world was largely on track regarding the implementation of elementary schooling for everyone by 2030. Gakidou has also been cited 200,000 times by other researchers.
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Benefitting NTNU
Health is one of NTNU’s strategic research areas, and starting this year, health throughout the entire lifecycle is a major part of the initiative. In this context, the collaboration with IHME and our honorary doctors becomes especially important.
“Murray and Gakidou have made very important contributions to the overview and understanding of health conditions around the world. They collect data from various population surveys, make them comparable, and through this provide access to entirely new knowledge,” said Gunnar Bovim, former rector at NTNU and chair of the Research Council of Norway’s Executive Board.
“The research collaboration between CHAIN, HUNT and the honorary doctors has great potential and aligns perfectly with NTNU’s strategy ‘Knowledge for a better world’,” said Bovim.
“Through CHAIN, NTNU is now helping to steer the GBD Study in a completely new direction, where the social sciences are afforded a larger role,” said Eikemo.
People who live in good social and economic conditions generally have better health. This is related to less risky behaviour, better jobs and better access to healthcare services. We know this, but it has proven difficult to account for social risk factors in the GBD Study, which is an epidemiological study. Until now.
The close collaboration that NTNU has with the GBD Study will likely result in a low level of education becoming the 89th risk factor in the next round of what will become GBD 2023.
“This could have a great impact on health, education and aid policies around the world. But while this collaboration offers great opportunities for NTNU, making Gakidou and Murray honorary doctors is primarily an opportunity for us to recognize their work,” said Krokstad.
