The structure of the leading causes of death in Serbia has considerably
changed in the last half century. Diseases which presented the main threat to
the population a few decades ago are now at the level of a statistical error.
On the one side are causes which drastically changed their share in total
mortality in this time interval, while others have shown stability and
persistence among the basic causes of death. Acute infectious diseases "have
been replaced" with chronic noninfectious diseases, due to the improvement of
general and health conditions. One of the consequences of such changes is
increased life expectancy and a larger share of older population which
resulted in cardiovascular diseases and tumors to dominate more and more in
total mortality. Convergent trends in the structure of the leading causes of
death in Serbia from the middle of the 20th century are the reasons why there
are considerably fewer diseases and causes with a significant rate in total
population mortality at the beginning of the 21st century. During the 1950s,
there were five groups of diseases and causes which participated individually
with more than 10% of population mortality (infectious diseases, heart and
circulatory diseases, respiratory diseases, some perinatal conditions and
undefined states) while at the beginning of the new century there were only
two such groups (cardiovascular diseases and tumors). Identical trends exist
in all European countries, as well as in the rest of the developed world. The
leading causes of death in Serbia are cardiovascular diseases. An average of
somewhat over 57.000 people died annually in the period from 2007 - 2009,
which represents 55.5% of total population mortality. Women are more numerous
among the deceased and this difference is increasing due to population
feminization. The most frequent cause of death in Serbia, after heart and
circulatory diseases, are tumors, which caused 21,415 deaths in 2009.
Neoplasms are responsible for one fifth of all deaths. Their number has
doubled in three decades, from 9,107 in 1975 to about 20,000 at the beginning
of the 21st century, whereby tumors have become the fastest growing cause of
death. Least changes in absolute number of deaths in the last half century
were marked among violent deaths. Observed by gender, men are in average
three times more numerous among violent deaths than women. In the middle of
the 20th century in Serbia, one third of the deaths caused by violence were
younger than 25 and as many as one half were younger than 35 years old. Only
one tenth (11%) of total number of violent deaths were from the age group of
65 or older. At the end of the first decade of the 21st century (2009), the
share of population younger than 25 in the total number of violent deaths was
decreased four times (and amounted to 8%). At the same time, the rate of
those older than 65 or more quadrupled (amounted to 39%).
The epidemiological situation as a factor determining the strategy for reducing mortality in the Russian Federation
