What it is
Non-communicable diseases are chronic conditions that are not passed from person to person — cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, chronic lung disease and mental health conditions among them. Adolescents already carry a substantial burden from such conditions. What is monitored globally, and what this page reports, is narrower: the behavioural risk factors that become established during adolescence and shape disease risk across the rest of life.
Why it matters
What these risk factors affect
- 01The burden in adolescence is already substantialGlobally, an estimated one in two disability-adjusted life years and one in five deaths among adolescents are attributed to non-communicable diseases.
- 02Adult disease is set up in childhoodEstimates suggest that approximately 70 per cent of premature deaths among adults stem from health-related behaviours that originate in childhood and adolescence.
- 03The main drivers are behaviouralPhysical inactivity, unhealthy diet, tobacco use and harmful use of alcohol are the primary drivers, and each typically becomes established during adolescence.
- 04This is where prevention is cheapestActing on a behaviour before it is entrenched is more tractable than treating the disease it produces decades later.
Where we are
Insufficient physical activity affects more than four in five adolescents
About 82 per cent of adolescents do not get enough physical activity — the most widespread of the three risk factors monitored here, and higher among girls than boys. That estimate covers roughly three quarters of the world's adolescents.
Around 26 per cent of adolescents report alcohol use and about 12 per cent report tobacco use. Both are around twice as common among boys as among girls.
These estimates are older and thinner than the coverage figures elsewhere on this site. The alcohol and physical activity estimates date from 2016 and the tobacco estimate from 2022, and the physical activity and tobacco estimates cover under three quarters of the global adolescent population. They are the most recent globally comparable estimates available to this portal, not the most recent data collected anywhere.
Behavioural risk factors among adolescents. These are separate measures of different behaviours, not steps in a sequence.
26.4%of adolescents
Adolescent health regional aggregates, February 2026
Each estimate comes from a different reference period and a different set of countries, so the three should be read individually rather than compared with one another.
Equity
Differences between girls and boys
Sex is the disaggregation available for all three risk factors, and it runs in opposite directions: boys report more alcohol and tobacco use, girls more insufficient physical activity.
- Boys35.2%
- Girls17%
- Boys14.6%
- Girls8.1%
- Girls85.9%
- Boys78.4%
Source: Adolescent health regional aggregates, February 2026.
What is measured
Risk factors are monitored, the diseases themselves are not
There is no coverage indicator here in the sense used elsewhere on this site — nothing is being delivered to a population and counted. These are self-reported behaviours, measured in school-based and household surveys, and they stand in for a disease burden that will mostly appear later in life.
That substitution is deliberate and reasonable, but it means these figures describe risk rather than illness, and they cannot be read as a measure of how well health systems are serving adolescents.
- Insufficient physical activity
- The percentage of adolescents not meeting the recommended level of physical activity for their age group.
- Alcohol use
- The percentage of adolescents reporting alcohol consumption, as defined by the source survey.
- Tobacco use
- The percentage of adolescents reporting tobacco use, as defined by the source survey.
Read these figures with care
- All three are self-reported behaviours. Under-reporting is likely where a behaviour is disapproved of or illegal for the age group, and the extent of it differs between countries.
- The estimates are not contemporaneous: alcohol and physical activity date from 2016, tobacco from 2022. They should not be presented as a single snapshot.
- Population coverage is incomplete — around 73 per cent for physical activity and 74 per cent for tobacco — so these are not estimates for all the world's adolescents.
- Many surveys are school-based, which excludes adolescents who are not in school. Those adolescents are unlikely to share the same risk profile.
Where to get the data
Where to find the data
References
- UNICEF, Non-communicable diseases, UNICEF Data, April 2021.
- World Health Organization, Global Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Noncommunicable Diseases.
- UNICEF, Progress in adolescent health and wellbeing: tracking 12 headline indicators for 195 countries and territories, 1990–2016.
Related topics
Copy last reviewed July 2026.