[Progress in research of burden of disease attributed to population ageing]

Objective: To summarize recent progress in research of burden of disease attributed to population ageing and provide reference for relevant research in the future. Methods: We conducted a systematic literature review of quantitative studies about the impact of population ageing on burden of disease published from 2009 to 2019 according to the inclusion and exclusion criteria through PubMed, Web of Science, Embase, Cochrane Library, Wangfang database and China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) databases and extracted basic information and key results of the searched literature. Results: A total of 65 studies were included in the analysis, in which 29 (44.6%) studies used death number or mortality rate as outcome measures, 43 (66.2%) studies focused on a single country, such as China, United Kingdom and United States, 39 (60.0%) studies quantified the impact of population ageing on single disease, such as diabetes, lung cancer and coronary heart disease, 44 (67.7%) studies used decomposition methods to quantify the impact of population ageing, and 10 (15.4%) studies evaluated the effect of interventions on alleviating the impact of population ageing. Most studies found that population ageing increased the burden of some diseases, such as cancer, cardiovascular disease and dementia, while a few studies reported that population ageing decreased the burden of some diseases, such as neonatal disease and malaria. Various decomposition methods were adopted in 65 included studies, but several common methods were sensitive to the preconditions that were assumed, the decomposition order of three factors (population size, age structure, and age-specific rate) and the choice of control group, resulting incomparable and unstable results. Conclusions: The published decomposition studies adopted various methods and only evaluated the impact of population ageing in very limited countries and for several diseases. Therefore, a systematic evaluation using robust decomposition method is very necessary to evaluate the impact of population aging on disease burden across countries and diseases.