Lung cancer, heart disease top list of preventable deaths in N.B.: health council

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Thousands of N.B. residents die in preventable ways

Deeper look at report on N.B. preventable deaths

The New Brunswick Health Council (NBHC) has released new data showing the leading causes of potentially preventable deaths each year in the province, with lung cancer and heart diseases at the top.

The data is from 2018 to 2022 and shows about 2,000 people died from preventable deaths each of those years.

A preventable death is considered anyone who died before the age of 75 but could have lived longer with proactive or preventative measures, like exercise and diet, or treatment options, like early screening, that are offered in the province.

Half, about 1,000, of the deaths were the result of six conditions: lung cancer, heart diseases, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), colorectal cancer, diabetes and stroke.

“New Brunswick is still higher than Canada on potentially avoidable deaths overall,” said Stéphane Robichaud, CEO of the NBHC. “We’re almost at the same rate when it comes to preventable causes. We’re higher on treatable causes.”

The data is broken down by the province’s seven health zones and different causes are more or less common in each one.

For instance, ‘drug disorders and poisoning’ are among the top 10 preventable deaths in the Moncton and Saint John areas, while transport accidents are in the top 10 within the Miramichi and Fredericton areas.

And the area of Bathurst and the Acadian Peninsula is actually better than the Canadian average in preventable and avoidable deaths.

It’s the first time in years this type of data has been collected in this way, says Robichaud, and it raises a lot of questions.

“Pursuing those questions, obvious questions, like, ‘Why would that be like that here?’” he said. “And what we found is when people pursue those questions locally, there are elements. Perhaps they have a very vulnerable population financially. And perhaps there are many obstacles, like transportation, for example, that make it that they don’t do their follow-up tests or whatever is needed, or they don’t participate in certain activities.”

When they compared the data between 2018 and 2022 to the years prior, researchers saw preventable deaths increase related to diabetes, alcohol-specific disorder, COPD, stroke and colorectal cancer.

The council is now hoping to collect the data once every five years to see if improvements have been made.

For more New Brunswick news, visit our dedicated provincial page.