Glossary

Epidemiologic transition

Defined in topic 36

Abdel Omran's 1971 framework describing a shift from an age of pestilence and famine, through receding pandemics, to an age of degenerative and man-made diseases.

Published 22 September 2026Updated 22 September 2026

Where this comes from

Reference topic 36Why We Die the Way We DoAll of them, counted at the end: what people die of, and how long they are unwell first.

In the reference topic that owns this term

Reference topic 36, Why We Die the Way We Do, states the mismatch as a card: what the system evolved to expect, what it gets instead, and what happens in the gap.

Mismatch card

What it expects: A body that moves, eats, defends, senses and socializes in the conditions of Parts Two to Seven, with death arriving mostly from outside (infection, accident, violence) after a modal age in the seventies.
What it gets: Those conditions removed one at a time, with medical treatment supplied for each resulting failure.
What happens in the gap: Ten causes take 70.9% of US deaths, six of them substantially modifiable, and the United States carries the world's widest healthspan-lifespan gap at 12.4 years.

The full card, and the topic behind it

Related terms

Compression of morbidity

The argument behind this term, its studies and its notes are in Reference topic 36 of the reference library. The book gives the practical version. Get the book.