Introduction

Studies of the burden of disease aim to provide a comprehensive assessment of the comparative magnitude of the premature mortality and disability resulting from different diseases and injuries and from important risk factors.

A central objective of burden of disease studies is to attribute mortality and disability to their biological causes and to risk factors for disease. This distinguishes them from approaches to the measurement of health status at the population level that focus on the severity and consequences of disability, rather than its causes, such as the measures of healthy life expectancy discussed in session PAPP104-S03 .

Methods for the study of the burden of disease were developed in the early 1990s and used to estimate the global burden of disease (GBD) in 1990. Further GBD estimates were produced for 2000-02 and 2004. Then, following a thorough review of both data and methods, a new study of the GBD was published in 2012. This provided a series of estimates for 1990, 2005 and 2010 based on a consistent set of assumptions and methods.

This session focuses on explaining the methods used to study the burden of disease and the assumptions and value judgments that they embody. It gives less attention to the summarising the findings of such studies, but does discuss a few of the insights that have been obtained using the methodology.

The methods used to quantify the burden of disease changed between 1992 and 2012. Where the methods have evolved over time, the session at least briefly mentions what was done previously as well as describing the methods used to produce the series of estimates published in 2012.