Question

What does global burden of a disease mean? Explain how global health researchers tend to measure how significant a health issue is (that is, its global burden and list some methods used for estimating disease burden in the population)

Answer 1

Global burden of disease is the measures for researching health of the population worldwide. Health adjusted life years(HALY) are measures including DALYs and QALYs ,mortality for determining health of population in burden of disease estimation.

HALYs used to measure health of a population, typically used in estimates of the burden of disease. It compares  cost-effectiveness of various health interventions.HALYs including DALYs ( disability adjusted life year) and QALY s ( quality adjusted life year) need mortality rates, disease incidence, health state distribution, health state duration and weights associated with easch health state is used to estimate global burden of diseases.

According to Lozano et al. six steps are used to calculate burden of disease

1. Assessment of completeness of death recording in each source
2. Mapping revisions and variants of the ICD
3. Redistributionof deaths assigned to garbage codes
4. Age splitting and age-sex splitting
5. Data smoothing
6. Outlier description

Ref:

1. Lozano R, Naghavi M, Foreman K, Lim S, Shibuya K, Aboyans V, et al. Global and regional mortality from 235 causes of death for 20 age groups in 1990 and 2010: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010. Lancet 2012 Dec 15;380(9859):2095-2128.