Question

What are vital statistics? What are health statistics? What do think the important differences between vital statistics and health statistics are? Why are maternal and neonatal mortality important indicators of the health of a population? What does DALY stand for and why is this statistic used? What is the general relationship between population health and economic development (describe the graph of life expectancy and GDP per capita or neonatal mortality and GDP per capita)?

Answer 1

Vital statistics are numerical record of marriage birth,sickness and death by which the health and growth of community may be studied.

Health statistics are numbers that summarise information related to health.

Health statistics is the numerical information of health provided by different health agencies while vital statistics give a representation on live births , foetal death, marriage , divorces and death etc.

There is little evidence that the use of maternal and infant mortality rate as a measure of population health has a negative impact on older groups in the ppopulation.MMR and IMR remains an important indicator of health for whole populations, reflecting the intuition that structural factors affecting the health of entire populations have an impact on the mortality rate of infants. For countries with limited resources that require an easily calculated, pithy measure of population health, MMR and IMR may remain a suitable choice.

DALY- Disability Adjusted Life Year

DALY is a measure of overall disease burden, expressed as the number of years lost due to ill-health, disability or early death.It is used in statistics to compare the overall health and life expectancy of different countries.

Life expectancy is the key metric for assessing population health. Broader than the narrow metric of the infant and child mortality, which focus solely at mortality at a young age, life expectancy captures the mortality along the entire life course. It tells us the average age of death in a population.

The relationship between income and life expectancy has been demonstrated by a number of statistical studies. Preston curve, for example, indicates that individuals born in wealthier countries, on average, can expect to live longer than those born in poor countries . It is not the aggregate growth in income, however, that matters most, but the reduction in poverty. As economy is rich their will be low chances of malnutrition or starvation leading to better health conditions.