Colorectal cancer is the third leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide. Given the recent increasing trends in colorectal cancer incidence globally, up-to-date information on the colorectal cancer burden could guide screening, early detection, and treatment strategies, and help effectively allocate resources. We examined the temporal patterns of the global, regional, and national burden of colorectal cancer and its risk factors in 204 countries and territories across the past three decades. Estimates of incidence, mortality, and disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) for colorectal cancer were generated as a part of the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries and Risk Factors Study (GBD) 2019 by age, sex, and geographical location for the period 1990–2019. Mortality estimates were produced using the cause of death ensemble model. We also calculated DALYs attributable to risk factors that had evidence of causation with colorectal cancer. Globally, between 1990 and 2019, colorectal cancer incident cases more than doubled, from 842 098 (95% uncertainty interval [UI] 810 408–868 574) to 2·17 million (2·00–2·34), and deaths increased from 518 126 (493 682–537 877) to 1·09 million (1·02–1·15). The global age-standardised incidence rate increased from 22·2 (95% UI 21·3–23·0) per 100 000 to 26·7 (24·6–28·9) per 100 000, whereas the age-standardised mortality rate decreased from 14·3 (13·5–14·9) per 100 000 to 13·7 (12·6–14·5) per 100 000 and the age-standardised DALY rate decreased from 308·5 (294·7–320·7) per 100 000 to 295·5 (275·2–313·0) per 100 000 from 1990 through 2019. Taiwan (province of China; 62·0 [48·9–80·0] per 100 000), Monaco (60·7 [48·5–73·6] per 100 000), and Andorra (56·6 [42·8–71·9] per 100 000) had the highest age-standardised incidence rates, while Greenland (31·4 [26·0–37·1] per 100 000), Brunei (30·3 [26·6–34·1] per 100 000), and Hungary (28·6 [23·6–34·0] per 100 000) had the highest age-standardised mortality rates. From 1990 through 2019, a substantial rise in incidence rates was observed in younger adults (age <50 years), particularly in high Socio-demographic Index (SDI) countries. Globally, a diet low in milk (15·6%), smoking (13·3%), a diet low in calcium (12·9%), and alcohol use (9·9%) were the main contributors to colorectal cancer DALYs in 2019. The increase in incidence rates in people younger than 50 years requires vigilance from researchers, clinicians, and policy makers and a possible reconsideration of screening guidelines. The fast-rising burden in low SDI and middle SDI countries in Asia and Africa calls for colorectal cancer prevention approaches, greater awareness, and cost-effective screening and therapeutic options in these regions. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Aim: This article reviews the studies examining patients' perspective toward telemedicine and their preference for virtual health care services. Methods: An electronic literature search using PubMed was conducted to identify relevant research studies published between December 2019 and August 2020. Twenty-five studies were selected out of 1,041 studies based on inclusion and exclusion criteria, which highlight patients' satisfaction and experience with the use of telemedicine during the pandemic. Results: The findings based upon 48,144 surveyed patients and 146 providers in 12 different countries revealed high satisfaction with virtual encounters across a spectrum of diseases. Telemedicine was found satisfactory on various outcome measures, such as addressing patients' concerns, communication with health care providers, usefulness, and reliability. Most common advantages were time saved due to lesser traveling and waiting time, better accessibility, convenience, and cost efficiency. Age and sex did not significantly impact the satisfaction levels. Physicians and patients both showed a strong preference for continued usage and agreed upon telemedicine's potential to complement the regular health care services even after the pandemic. Technical challenges (reported in 10 studies) and lack of physical examination (reported in 13 studies) were the main limitations encountered in virtual visits. Conclusion: Long-term sustainability of telemedicine for all socioeconomic classes requires closer scrutiny of issues such as technology, training, reimbursement, data privacy, legal guidelines, and framework. Telemedicine must be adopted as a proactive strategy and scaled-up even beyond emergency usage due to its immense potential in complementing conventional health care services, such as diagnosis, treatment, follow-up, surveillance, and infection control.

This paper re-examines health-growth relationship using an unbalanced panel of 17 advanced economies for the period 1870–2013 and employs panel generalised method of moments estimator that takes care of endogeneity issues, which arise due to reverse causality. We utilise macroeconomic data corresponding to inflation, government expenditure, trade and schooling in sample countries that takes care of omitted variable bias in growth regression. With alternate model specifications, we show that population health proxied by life expectancy exert a positive and significant effect on both real income per capita as well as growth. Our results are in conformity with the existing empirical evidence on the relationship between health and economic growth, they, however, are more robust due to the presence of long-term data, appropriate econometric procedure and alternate model specifications. We also show a strong role of endogeneity in driving standard results in growth empirics. In addition to life expectancy, other constituent of human capital, education proxied by schooling is also positively associated with real per capita income. Policy implication that follows from this paper is that per capita income can be boosted through focussed policy attention on population health. The results, however, posit differing policy implications for advanced and developing economies.