"A sharp decline in deaths from malnutrition and infectious diseases like measles and tuberculosis has caused a shift in global mortality patterns over the past 20 years, according to a [study released] on Thursday, with far more of the world's population now living into old age and dying from diseases mostly associated with rich countries, like cancer and heart disease," the New York Times reports (Tavernise, 12/13). The Global Burden of Disease Study 2010, "published in the Lancet, has taken more than five years and involves 486 authors in 50 countries," the Guardian's "Poverty Matters" blog notes (Mead, 12/13). Researchers worldwide "drew conclusions from nearly 100,000 data sources, including surveys, censuses, hospital records and verbal autopsies," NPR's "Shots" blog writes (Doucleff, 12/13). The Global Burden of Disease (GBD) Study 2010 consists of "[s]even separate reports conducted by researchers at the University of Washington, the Harvard School of Public Health, and elsewhere [that] gauged people's health in 187 countries and determined that developing countries are looking more like richer Westernized countries in terms of the health problems that pose the biggest burden: high blood pressure, diabetes, cancer, and heart disease," according to the Boston Globe (Kotz, 12/13).