BACKGROUND Diabetic patients' lifestyle adaptations to improve glycaemic control are not always followed by improvements in self-rated general health (SRH). The perceived impact of diabetes on patients' daily lives may influence changes in their SRH. This paper examines the association of illness severity, treatment, behavioural, and coping-related factors with changes in SRH from diagnosis of ...

We argue that the global burden of mental illness is underestimated and examine the reasons for under-estimation to identify five main causes: overlap between psychiatric and neurological disorders; the grouping of suicide and self-harm as a separate category; conflation of all chronic pain syndromes with musculoskeletal disorders; exclusion of personality disorders from disease burden calculat...

The uncertainty attendant to burden-of-illness estimates should be taken into account in comparing the public health impact of different foodborne pathogens. In this paper, decision analysis concepts are applied to the comparisons of pathogen-specific burden-of-illness estimates. In situations wherein the magnitude of uncertainty varies, the rank order of pathogen-specific burden-of-illness est...

BACKGROUND Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs) afflict around one billion individuals in the poorest parts of the world with many more at risk. Lymphatic filariasis is one of the most prevalent of the infections and causes significant morbidity in those who suffer the clinical conditions, particularly lymphedema and hydrocele. Depressive illness has been recognised as a prevalent disability in t...

A cost-of-illness framework was applied to health and income data to quantify the health burden from illnesses associated with exposure to polluted recreational marine waters. Using data on illness severity due to exposure to polluted coastal water and estimates of mean annual salaries and medical costs (adjusted to 2001 values) for residents of Orange County, California, we estimated that the ...

OBJECTIVE We compared the distribution by wealth of self-reported illness burden (estimated from validated scales, biomarker and reported symptoms) for angina, cataract, depression, diabetes and osteoarthritis, with the distribution of self-reported medical diagnosis and treatment. We aimed to determine if the greater illness burden borne by poorer participants was matched by appropriately high...