ArticlesYears lived with disability (YLDs) for 1160 sequelae of 289 diseases and injuries 1990–2010: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010
Introduction
Non-fatal health outcomes from diseases and injuries are a crucial consideration in the promotion and monitoring of individual and population health. In an era in which the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have refocused global health attention on prevention of mortality from selected disorders, it is important to emphasise that health is about more than avoiding death. Individuals, households, and health systems devote enormous resources to the cure, prevention, and amelioration of non-fatal sequelae of diseases and injuries. Some form of periodic accounting about the burden of non-fatal illness in populations, and how it is changing, should therefore be available for policy making and planning. Quantification of the burden of non-fatal health outcomes was one of the main goals in launching the Global Burden of Disease study (GBD) in the 1990s.1 The study introduced the disability-adjusted life-year (DALY) as a time-based measure of health that enables commensurable measurement of years of life lost due to premature mortality (YLLs) with years of life lived in less than ideal health (years lived with disability [YLDs]). The amalgamation of both components of individual and population health under a comprehensive framework for measuring population health can provide important insights into a broader set of causes of disease burden than can consideration of mortality alone.
To our knowledge, the various revisions of the GBD are the only effort to quantify non-fatal health outcomes across an exhaustive set of disorders at the global and regional level.2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Many national burden of disease studies and subnational studies have analysed local patterns of YLDs as well.9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 Publication of the GBD 1990 results raised awareness about a range of disorders that primarily cause ill health and not death, such as unipolar major depression, bipolar disorder, asthma, and osteoarthritis.17, 18, 19 This attention has led to greater policy debate and action on mental health and other non-communicable diseases at WHO,4, 20, 21 in non-governmental organisations, and in many countries.22 The burden of non-fatal illness attributed to some parasitic diseases has also been an important issue highlighted by the GBD findings.23, 24, 25, 26
Despite the unique role of the GBD in provision of comparative quantification of the burden of non-fatal health outcomes, there have been important limitations. The evidence on MDG-related diseases has been regularly revised and incorporated into updates of the GBD, but many disorders have not been systematically analysed since 1990. Global Health Statistics, a companion volume to the original Global Burden of Disease and Injuries book, provided estimates of incidence, prevalence, remission, and case fatality for 483 sequelae, by age and sex, for eight regions of the world.27 The GBD 2000 revisions included 474 sequelae. A substantial number, but not all, of these sequelae were revised since GBD 1990. Those that were not revised were approximated with constant relations between YLLs and YLDs or YLD rates estimated from the GBD 1990. Even when revisions were undertaken, however, many were not based on systematic analyses of published studies and unpublished sources. The epidemiological inputs to YLD estimates such as prevalence have been released for only 40 sequelae. The most important limitation of both the GBD 1990 and 2000 efforts is that YLDs have not been estimated with uncertainty. Uncertainty can come from many sources, including heterogeneity in the empirical data that are available and uncertainty in the indirect estimation models used to make predictions for populations with little or no data. Because the empirical basis for estimating prevalence or incidence is much weaker for some sequelae than it is for others, uncertainty is likely to vary substantially across sequelae and across countries and regions for the same sequelae.8, 28
The Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2010 (GBD 2010) provided an important opportunity to address the key limitations of past burden of disease assessments, including a more standardised approach to evidence synthesis, epidemiological estimation with uncertainty, and assessment of comorbidity. In this Article, we describe the approach to undertaking these analyses with the available evidence, and discuss key comparative results. Subsequent disease-specific and injury-specific papers are planned that will provide much more detail on data, methods, and results for various disorders of interest.
Section snippets
Overview
Details of the GBD 2010 hierarchical cause list, the 21 epidemiological regions (and combinations of these into seven super-regions), the 20 age groups, and the relation between different components of GBD 2010 are published elsewhere.29 For the GBD 2010, YLDs are computed as the prevalence of a sequela multiplied by the disability weight for that sequela without age weighting or discounting. The YLDs arising from a disease or injury are the sum of the YLDs for each of the sequelae associated
Results
Global prevalence for all ages combined in 2010 across the 1160 sequelae varied from fewer than one case per 1 million people to 350 000 cases per 1 million people. 58 sequelae each affected more than 1% of the global population. Table 1 shows the global prevalence of the 50 most common sequelae in 2010. Of these sequelae, four were oral health disorders (dental caries of permanent teeth, chronic periodontitis, dental caries of baby teeth, and edentulism). Four skin diseases were also very
Discussion
We know of no other complete assessment of the prevalence of sequelae from diseases and injuries and their associated YLDs since GBD 1990. Prevalences of the 1160 sequelae ranged by more than a factor of 100 000 from the least to the most common. Taking into account severity, on average, every person in the world had an 11% reduction in their overall health in 2010 because of diseases and injuries. The prevalence of diseases and injuries and YLDs per person increased steadily with age in all
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