In the Global Burden of Disease study, disease burden is measured as disability-adjusted life years (DALYs). The paramount assumption of the DALY is that it makes sense to aggregate years lived with disability (YLDs) and years of life lost (YLLs). However, this is not smooth sailing. Whereas morbidity (YLD) is something that happens to an individual, loss of life itself (YLL) occurs when that i...

BACKGROUND Musculoskeletal conditions are highly prevalent in our ageing society and are therefore incurring substantial increases in population levels of years lived with disability (YLD). An evidence-based approach to the prognosis, prevention, and treatment of those disorders can allow an overall improvement in the quality of life of patients, while also softening the burden on national heal...

Background: This study uses data of the global burden of diseases (GBD) study 2010 to report death, disability-adjusted life year (DALYs), years of life lived with disability (YLDs) and years of life lost due to premature mortality (YLLs), attributed to suboptimal breastfeeding by age and gender during 1990 to 2010 in Iran. Materials and Methods:The GBD assessments were used, together with esti...

The burden [as defined by the World Health Organisation (WHO)] of brain diseases (neurological, neurosurgical and psychiatric diseases together) is very high and yet resources spent on these diseases are not necessarily commensurate with the extent of this burden. However, hard data on the burden of brain diseases in Europe have not previously been easily accessible. The Global Burden of Diseas...

BACKGROUND The objective of this study was to estimate the burden of disease and injury in Iran for the year 2003, using Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) at the national level and for six selected provinces. METHODS Methods developed by the World Health Organization for National Burden of Disease (NBD) studies were applied to estimate disease and injury incidence for the calculation of ...

Disability-adjusted life year (DALY) is a metric that combines both fatal and non-fatal health problems into a single number. It is the primary metric used by the World Health Organization to assess the global burden of disease, and the metrics for cancer were published in GLOBOCAN2008, which is a project to estimate the incidence, mortality, prevalence and DALY for major types of cancers, at n...

The publication of the paper from Lori Uscher-Pines is timely. She points to a knowledge gap in the humanitarian field: the indirect or delayed health cost of natural disasters. This is a serious shortcoming, considering as she correctly noted that humanitarian response is far more likely to reduce the delayed mortality than affect the number of deaths directly and immediately attributable to t...

BACKGROUND Various Burden of Disease (BoD) studies do not account for multimorbidity in their BoD estimates. Ignoring multimorbidity can lead to inaccuracies in BoD estimations, particularly in ageing populations that include large proportions of persons with two or more health conditions. The objective of this study is to improve BoD estimates for the Netherlands by accounting for multimorbidi...