Distinguishing health expectancies and health-adjusted life expectancies from quality-adjusted life years.

Health-adjusted life expectancy.

In 1991, the National Task Force on Health Information recommended that in order to assess the health of Canadians, the health information system should include an aggregate index of population health. This article presents such an index--Health-Adjusted Life Expectancy (HALE)--as one possibility in a range of indicators. In contrast to conventional life expectancy, which considers all years as...

Burden of Disease in Asian Countries and the use of Disability-Adjusted Life-Years and Quality-Adjusted Life-Years.

• Both QALYs and DALYs are also usually discounted, meaning more weight can be given to immediate over distant outcomes, and both measures can account for disease severity. The two measures however are not interchangeable.1 For example, DALYs incorporate an age-weighting function, which assigns lower weights to the years of the young and elderly, and the origins of disability and quality of lif...

Measuring health-related quality of life (HRQoL) and quality-adjusted life years (QALY) in the critical care setting

Estimating health utilities and quality adjusted life years in seasonal affective disorder research.

BACKGROUND Seasonal affective disorder (SAD) episodes will recur annually without effective intervention. Effectiveness of such interventions is traditionally measured with depression-specific tools (e.g., Beck Depression Inventory 2nd Edition; BDI-II). In a climate of potentially scarce resources, generic outcomes, such as Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALYs), are recommended for cost-effective...

Problems and solutions in calculating quality-adjusted life years (QALYs)

The quality-adjusted life-year (QALY) is a measure of the value of health outcomes. Since health is a function of length of life and quality of life, the QALY was developed as an attempt to combine the value of these attributes into a single index number. The QALY calculation is simple: the change in utility value induced by the treatment is multiplied by the duration of the treatment effect to...