Deaths from non-communicable disease recorded between 2018 and 2020. Use the filters to read the pattern by cause, by sex and by age band.
Reading the dashboard alongside the published literature.
The dashboard covers ages 15 to 69 deliberately. These are deaths in the years when people are earning and raising families, which is what makes chronic disease an economic problem as well as a health one.
Pooled national estimates put hypertension at 29.8% in urban areas against 15.8% rural. With Freetown growing fast, the national figure will follow the urban one.
Most facility-based data comes from Freetown, where the tertiary hospitals are. That skews what the country appears to die of. Rural provinces are under-counted rather than under-affected.
The Stroke in Sierra Leone register found case fatality and disability rates that make the case for blood pressure control at primary care level better than any prevalence figure can.
The dashboard above is one view. These are the datasets and registers that carry the rest, several of them open to researchers on request.
A nationally representative population-based study using verbal autopsy to establish cause of death across Sierra Leone, led by Prabhat Jha and Rashid Ansumana. It carries cause-of-death data on stroke, heart disease, diabetes and cancer that no facility register can capture, because most deaths in this country never reach a facility.
A prospective register of every stroke presenting at Connaught Teaching Hospital and 34th Military Hospital in Freetown, funded by the NIHR and led from King's College London. It has produced the country's first case fatality rates, functional outcomes and quality-adjusted life year estimates after stroke.
Continuous national mortality surveillance covering births, deaths and causes of death through a sample of enumeration areas. The routine source for national mortality trends, including the non-communicable disease share.
The standard WHO instrument for measuring behavioural and biological risk factors: tobacco, alcohol, diet, physical activity, blood pressure, blood glucose and cholesterol. The comparator that lets Sierra Leone be read against its neighbours.
A census of all 1,284 public and private health facilities, recording equipment, diagnostics, medicines, guidelines and trained staff. This is where the facility readiness figures on the burden page come from.
Modelled estimates of prevalence, deaths and disability-adjusted life years for every condition, by year and by country. Useful for trends and for international comparison, though it is a model rather than a measurement.