Raymond A. Smego
As global populations age because of public health successes, increasingly, people are living with one or more chronic conditions for decades. Chronic conditions are projected to be the leading cause of disability throughout the world by the year 2020, and without successful prevention or control they will also become the most expensive problems faced by global health care systems. Persons with diabetes, as an example, generate health care costs that are 2-3-fold higher than non-diabetics, and in Latin America the costs of lost production due to diabetes are estimated to be five times the direct health care costs. The current special issue of International Journal of Collaborative Research on Internal Medicine & Public Health (IJCRIMPH) has focused on "Chronic Disease Epidemiology".
