Key takeaways:

• Worldwide life expectancy increased by 64.6 years in 1990 to 73.8 years in 2023.
• But the global morbidity gap rose from 8.8 years to 10.7 years during that period.

More people globally are living longer, but many of those extra years are spent experiencing disability and diseases, according to a new report in Lancet Public Health.

“The central finding is that we are adding years to life faster than we are adding health to those years,” Simon I. Hays, DPhil, DSc, FMedSci, director of research strategy at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), told Healio.

Data derived from Hay SI, et al. Lancet Public Health. 2026;doi:10.1016/S2468-2667(26)00098-8.

Several recent IHME reports have indicated encouraging jumps in life expectancy over the last couple years, with a 2025 study showing that life expectancy returned to prepandemic rates in 2023, although the U.S. remains behind other developed countries in this area.

In the current analysis, Hays and colleagues looked at the trajectories of multiple measurements of healthy aging — including life expectancy, the morbidity gap and healthy life expectancy (the average years lived in good health) — from 1990 to 2023 using Global Burden of Disease 2023 estimates.

They reported that worldwide life expectancy at birth rose from 64.6 years to 73.8 years from 1990 and 2023, while healthy life expectancy rose from 55.9 years to 63.1 years during that time.

But such gains did not equal healthier lives, as the global morbidity gap increased from 8.8 years to 10.7 years during the study period.

People in 2023 spent an average of 14.5% of their lives in poor health, the release said, vs. 13.6% in 1990.

The largest morbidity gap in 2023 across all countries and regions was 14 years in the U.S., followed by Australia at 13.9 years and Canada at 13.7 years.

The researchers noted that women across all regions consistently lived longer than men but also experienced more years in poorer health.

Specifically, women possessed an average morbidity gap of 12.1 years in 2023 compared with 9.3 years among men.

Hays and colleagues reported that several mostly nonfatal morbidities, including musculoskeletal disorders, depressive and anxiety disorders, age-related hearing loss, falls and other noncommunicable diseases, contributed to 57.4% of unhealthy years globally in 2023, “with nutritional disorders also contributing substantially in some lower socio-demographic index contexts.”

The researchers acknowledged that the availability and quantity of data varied across countries and regions — “with particularly limited data in low-income settings” — while their findings “reflect population-level trends, not individual experiences, with some individuals experiencing far more or fewer years of poor health than the mean.”

Hays told Healio that one encouraging finding for clinicians “is that the conditions filling the gap are largely preventable or manageable: they are rarely the ones that kill people, so they can be acted on.”

He provided some clinical guidance based on the report, which includes:

• managing upstream risks “aggressively and early: high blood sugar, obesity, high BP and tobacco are the dominant modifiable drivers, so glycemic control, weight management, BP control and smoking cessation are high yield for future healthy years, not just for mortality”;
• screening and treatment of mental health disorders, hearing loss and falls risk among older adults;
• treating low back pain with “early activity, physiotherapy and self-management over escalation to imaging or opioids”;
• asking patients about hearing, independence, mood, mobility and pain while tracking those areas over time “rather than focusing only on disease labels and biomarkers”; and
• preparing for patients to live longer with several conditions.