Closing the mortality gap for people with disabilities

There are about 1·3 billion people with disability globally, and their higher mortality rates mean that they are dying about 14 years earlier than people without disability.1, 2 In this issue of The Lancet Public Health, Yi Yang and colleagues’ study³ adds to this literature. Using large-scale longitudinal data from 15 million Australians, they showed that people with disability have high inequalities—whether measured on an absolute or relative scale and across different causes of death. Overall, mortality rates were about 3·7-times higher for men with disability and about 4·6-times higher for women with disability than their non-disabled peers. This Article³ adds to the growing, unequivocal evidence on the relationship between mortality and disability. It also highlights three key questions that need to be addressed before public health actors start to take this issue seriously.