Health promotion focuses on the conditions and choices that help people prevent disease and maintain well-being. The statistics below show the scale of preventable health risks worldwide, alongside participation and coverage measures from the United States. Measurement years differ by topic, so each figure is labeled with its period and geography.
Contents
- Global burden of preventable chronic disease
- Physical activity participation and inactivity
- Overweight, obesity and nutrition-related health
- Tobacco use and prevention
- Alcohol-attributable health burden
- Screening and vaccination coverage
- Mental health and emotional well-being
Global burden of preventable chronic disease
Noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) remain a central health-promotion challenge. The World Health Organization reported that NCDs killed at least 43 million people worldwide in 2021. They represented 75% of non-pandemic-related deaths globally that year. About 18 million people died from an NCD before age 70.
The burden is distributed unevenly. Low- and middle-income countries accounted for 73% of all NCD deaths in 2021 and 82% of premature NCD deaths. These figures make prevention relevant not only to individual behavior, but also to access, income, education, healthy environments and early care.
The largest disease categories reported by WHO included:
| Cause | Worldwide deaths | Period |
|---|---|---|
| Cardiovascular diseases | At least 19 million | 2021 |
| Cancers | About 10 million | 2021 |
| Chronic respiratory diseases | About 4 million | 2021 |
These categories are reported in the WHO source “Noncommunicable diseases”. The source describes the figures as part of the global NCD burden; they should not be treated as a forecast or as a count of deaths that could all be prevented through one intervention.
Physical activity participation and inactivity
Movement is one measurable part of health promotion. In 2022, 31% of adults worldwide did not meet the recommendation of at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity per week. The global adult physical-inactivity estimate increased by 5 percentage points between 2010 and 2022. Among adolescents, 80% did not meet recommended physical-activity levels in the latest WHO estimate reported in 2024.
The financial implications are also substantial. WHO estimates that the public-health-care cost of physical inactivity could reach about US$300 billion during 2020–2030 if inactivity is not reduced. This is a forecast for that period, not a record of spending already incurred. The figures and recommendation are from WHO’s “Physical activity”.
U.S. data show how participation varies by educational attainment. In 2022, 22.5% of U.S. adults aged 25 years and older met both federal aerobic and muscle-strengthening guidelines. The percentage was 12.2% among adults with a high-school education or less, compared with 33.6% among adults with at least a bachelor’s degree. These are subgroup estimates, not a measure of individual motivation or a universal threshold for health.
An earlier U.S. measure found that 46.3% of adults aged 18 years and older met neither the aerobic nor the muscle-strengthening guideline in 2020. The educational-attainment figures are from the CDC “QuickStats: Percentage of Adults Aged ≥25 Years Who Met the 2018 Federal Physical Activity Guidelines…”; the 2020 estimate appears in the same CDC source.
Overweight, obesity and nutrition-related health
Weight-related measures illustrate the scale of nutrition-related health challenges across age groups. Worldwide in 2022, 2.5 billion adults aged 18 years and older were overweight, equal to 43% of adults. More than 890 million adults were living with obesity, representing 16% of adults.
The pattern also affects children and adolescents. In 2024, an estimated 35 million children under age 5 were overweight worldwide. In 2022, more than 390 million children and adolescents aged 5–19 were overweight. Twenty percent of that 5–19 age group were overweight, including obesity, compared with 8% in 1990.
Higher-than-optimal body mass index caused an estimated 3.7 million NCD deaths in 2021. This is an estimate attributed to a risk factor and should not be read as a count of deaths caused by a single food, product or personal decision. The figures come from WHO’s “Obesity and overweight”.
For health promotion, these measures point toward prevention across the life course: healthy food environments, opportunities for movement, early support for children and adolescents, and care that avoids stigma. The supplied figures quantify overweight, obesity and associated risk; they do not provide a complete measure of fruit and vegetable intake or of diet quality.
Tobacco use and prevention
Tobacco exposure continues to create a large preventable burden. WHO estimates that tobacco use kills more than 7 million people worldwide each year, while exposure to second-hand tobacco smoke kills more than 1.6 million non-smokers annually. About 1.2 billion people worldwide use tobacco, and around 80% of tobacco users live in low- and middle-income countries. These annual and latest-estimate figures are reported by WHO in “Tobacco and nicotine”; the source reports them as estimates rather than as a dated mortality census.
U.S. measures provide a more specific snapshot. In 2022, 49.2 million U.S. adults, or 19.8%, reported current tobacco-product use. Among U.S. middle and high school students, 10.0%, representing 2.80 million students, reported current tobacco-product use in 2023.
E-cigarette use among students was 10.0% for U.S. high school students and 4.6% for U.S. middle school students in the past 30 days in 2023. Among high school students, current e-cigarette use fell from 14.1% in 2022 to 10.0% in 2023. The student figures are from the CDC’s “Tobacco Product Use Among U.S. Middle and High School Students — National Youth Tobacco Survey, 2023”. The adult figure is from “Current Cigarette Smoking Among Adults in the United States”.
Alcohol-attributable health burden
WHO estimated that alcohol consumption caused about 2.6 million deaths worldwide in 2019. Alcohol-attributable deaths included about 1.6 million from NCDs, about 700,000 from injuries and about 300,000 from communicable diseases. These are attributable estimates for 2019, not a current annual count.
In the same year, an estimated 400 million people aged 15 years and older, or 7% of that population, lived with an alcohol-use disorder. An estimated 209 million adults, or 3.7% of the world’s adult population, lived with alcohol dependence.
Specific disease burdens included an estimated 474,000 cardiovascular-disease deaths worldwide in 2019. Alcohol consumption was attributed to 4.4% of cancers diagnosed globally and 401,000 cancer deaths that year. The measures are reported in WHO’s “Alcohol”. Because these statistics use different outcomes and denominators, they should not be added together as a single total beyond the reported overall estimate.
Screening and vaccination coverage
Preventive services can identify disease earlier or reduce the risk of infection, but coverage varies by service and eligible group. In the United States in 2023, 80.0% of women aged 50–74 were up to date with breast-cancer screening. Among women aged 40–49, 62.1% had received a mammogram within two years.
The same year, 75.4% of U.S. women aged 21–65 were up to date with cervical-cancer screening. Overall, 67.4% of U.S. adults in the screening-eligible age range were up to date with colorectal-cancer screening, while the figure for adults aged 45–49 was 37.1%. These estimates come from the CDC’s “Use of Cancer Screening Tests, United States, 2023”. Eligibility and the definition of “up to date” differ by screening test.
Vaccination coverage also varied in U.S. adult measures collected during fall 2023:
| Preventive service | Coverage | Measurement period or year |
|---|---|---|
| Influenza vaccine, adults 18+ | 42.2% | September 24–December 9, 2023 |
| Updated COVID-19 vaccine, adults 18+ | 18.3% | September 24–December 9, 2023 |
| Ever received pneumococcal vaccine, adults 65+ | 65.6% | 2023 |
The influenza and updated COVID-19 figures are from the CDC report “Influenza, Updated COVID-19, and Respiratory Syncytial Virus Vaccination Coverage Among Adults — United States, Fall 2023”. The pneumococcal figure is from “Vaccination Coverage among Adults in the United States, National Health Interview Survey, 2023”. “Ever received” is not the same measure as coverage during a particular season.
Mental health and emotional well-being
Health promotion includes mental health, prevention and access to care. Nearly 1.2 billion people, or almost 1 in 7 people worldwide, were living with a mental disorder in 2023. About 470 million people worldwide were living with an anxiety disorder, including 146 million children and adolescents.
Access to formal care remains limited in the latest WHO estimates reported in 2026: only 40% of people with psychosis receive formal mental-health care worldwide, and approximately 33% of people with depression receive formal mental-health care worldwide. These are care-coverage estimates and do not indicate that the remaining people have identical needs or outcomes. The figures are from WHO’s “Mental disorders”.
Recent U.S. adolescent measures show the importance of early support. During 2021–2023, 20% of U.S. adolescents aged 12–17 reported anxiety symptoms during the previous two weeks, and 18% reported depression symptoms during the previous two weeks. In 2023, 39.7% of U.S. high school students experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, while 28.5% reported poor mental health.
The adolescent symptom estimates are reported by the CDC in “Data and Statistics on Children’s Mental Health”. The high-school estimates come from “Mental Health and Suicide Risk Among High School Students and Protective Factors — Youth Risk Behavior Survey, United States, 2023”. The different age ranges, recall periods and survey populations mean these percentages should be compared cautiously rather than combined.