The cost of the four biggest killer diseases in England could rise to £86 billion a year by 2050, prompting calls for tougher measures on alcohol, junk food and smoking.
As the population ages, the annual cost of cancer, heart disease, dementia and stroke combined will rise from £51.9 billion in 2018 to £85.6 billion in 2050. That’s an increase of 61%.
These four conditions together account for 59% of all deaths and result in 5.1 million years of life lost.
Experts say the findings, published in the Lancet Healthy Longevity magazine, show that the new government must take determined action to improve the health of the population, to prevent the costs of ill health from becoming prohibitive.
Martin McKee, professor of European public health at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said: “These expected costs should scare the Treasury.”
As the number of over-65s increases in the coming years, the cost of dementia alone will double to £23.5 billion and the financial impact of strokes will increase by 85% to £16 billion, the research found.
Similarly, the cost of heart disease would rise by 54% to £19.6 billion and cancer – the most expensive of the four conditions – by 40% to £26.5 billion.
The estimates cover the total economic costs, through lost productivity and family members providing informal care, rather than just the money spent on them by the NHS and social care systems.
In its election manifesto, Labour pledged to “deliver a renewed drive to tackle the biggest killers; reducing the number of lives lost to cancer, heart disease and suicide, while ensuring that people live better for longer. Much avoidable ill health can be prevented.”
Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, has made it one of his priorities to make the NHS more of a preventive service.
The research was led by Dr Ramon Luengo-Fernandez, from the Nuffield Department of Population Health at the University of Oxford, and funded by Alzheimer’s Research UK. He and colleagues reached their conclusions after examining population-level projections for ageing out to 2050 and detailed NHS data showing how often almost 4.2 million people access healthcare.
He said ministers should ensure that people stay healthy for longer and that they only develop life-shortening conditions much closer to the end of their lives, rather than decades earlier, as is currently the case for many.
“We can never prevent all cases (of these diseases) — we all have to die of something,” Luengo-Fernandez said. “What I think we need to do is prevent diseases at a younger age, so that when diseases do occur, say dementia or stroke, it happens at the end of a person’s life, say at age 90, rather than at age 60 or 70.
“A better diet, physical activity (and) not smoking would go a long way to achieving this. If we could reduce the smoking rate from over 50% to about 13% today, I see no reason why we couldn’t achieve these successes in other areas.”
A large increase in the amount of physical activity people do could improve health, reduce the burden of disease and reduce associated costs, he said. Spending more resources on primary care, including primary care, would boost earlier detection of cancer and reduce the cost of treatment.
Cancer Research UK estimates that the number of new cancer diagnoses each year will likely rise from 420,000 now to 506,000 in 2040The number of people diagnosed with some form of dementia is expected to increase significantly.
The biggest increase in 2050 will be in social care costs for people with the four conditions. These are expected to rise by 110% to £13.5 billion a year for dementia, by 109% to £7.1 billion for stroke, by 91% to £4.4 billion for heart disease and by 88% to £2.9 billion for cancer.
McKee called for a crackdown on the industries that produce cigarettes, alcohol and unhealthy food, and a renewed attack on poverty. “For more than a decade, the UK has been competing with the US for last place among industrialised nations on health. This paper shows why that cannot continue,” he said.
“If the country is to escape a vicious circle of low productivity, caused in significant part by ill health and increasing demand on the NHS … it must prioritise not just the causes of disease but also the causes of those causes, including high levels of poverty and the actions of industries, such as alcohol, tobacco and junk food, that profit from this misery.”
A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: “We recognise that the health of the nation and our economy are inextricably linked. That’s why we’re taking bold action to fix our NHS and tackle the causes of disease.
“Prevention is better than cure. That is why the government will shift the focus of healthcare from simply treating diseases to preventing them.
“Whether it’s phasing out tobacco sales, introducing restrictions on junk food advertising or doubling the number of scanners to help the NHS detect cancer early again, we are committed to helping people live better for longer and unlocking the potential of our economy.”