Australian Centre for Monitoring Population Health

Living with overweight or obesity can have major impacts on a person’s physical and mental health and wellbeing. It is the second leading risk factor for ill-health and premature mortality in Australia. It increases the risk of many preventable chronic conditions such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes and many types of cancer. This web report provides an overview of the prevalence of Australians living with overweight and obesity.

Improving the Australian population’s exposure to lifestyle risk factors in physical inactivity and overweight (including obesity) reduces the risk of disease and the disease burden attributable to these risk factors. If exposure to overweight (including obesity) and physical inactivity is reduced, the loss of thousands of healthy years of life could be avoided in 2030.

This report presents results of various scenarios of reduced exposure to overweight (including obesity) and physical inactivity in terms of the disease burden avoided in 2030.

This report is the third national report to present key data specific to cancer in adolescents and young adults (aged 15–24 years) in Australia. While cancer in young Australians is rare, it has a substantial social and economic impact on individuals, families and communities. Surveillance of this population is also important as adolescent and young adult cancer survivors are at an increased risk of developing a second cancer. 

Mesothelioma in Australia 2021– infocus presents the latest available information on the incidence of mesothelioma in Australia, along with mortality, survival and asbestos exposure information, using data from the Australian Mesothelioma Registry, the National Mortality Database and the Australian Cancer Database. On average, 2 people are diagnosed with mesothelioma in Australia each day – with a median age at diagnosis of 77 years old.

This summary report presents a snapshot of key findings from the Dementia in Australia online report as at the end of 2022 and presents statistics on dementia prevalence, burden of disease, deaths, expenditure, carers of people with dementia and the use of health and aged care services among people with dementia. Refer to the Dementia in Australia online report for the most up-to-statistics on dementia in Australia.

In 2015, a number of supplementary codes for chronic conditions were implemented in admitted patient care data in Australia. This report evaluates the use of the supplementary codes for the purpose of population health monitoring in Australia and provides evidence for including these codes in future analysis and linked data assets.

People from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds are identified as a priority population in a number of key Australian Government health strategies. This web report is part of a program of work on the health status of CALD people in Australia and presents data on the prevalence of chronic conditions reported by CALD Australians in the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ 2021 Census of Population and Housing.

This is an initial summary report on the project ‘Establishing a COVID-19 linked data set’. The purpose of the report is to describe the aims, benefits, methods and some high level first results of the linkage. The report will be a resource for future researchers wanting to use the data. Future updates of this report will include more detailed analysis of linked data once available

Long COVID is a multi-system illness characterised by ongoing persistent symptoms that can last for weeks or months following COVID-19 infection. This review investigates the scale and impact of long COVID in the Australian context. The review found that most information is from research conducted in the USA and UK on long COVID related to COVID-19 infections in the first two years (2020–21) of the pandemic.

Medicare chronic disease management (CDM) services enable General Practitioners to plan and coordinate care for people with a chronic or terminal medical condition. These services also provide access to Medicare-subsidised individual and group allied health services for people with complex care needs to help manage their conditions. In 2019, more than 3.8 million patients had a CDM service while around 2.4 million patients received Medicare-subsidised allied health services.