A few findings

The following figure illustrates the differences between the picture of the burden of disease that one obtains by calculating DALYs and the impression that one would obtain from looking at statistics on deaths alone.

Source: Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (2013).

Ischaemic heart disease and stroke cause slightly fewer than 14 per cent and 12 per cent of deaths respectively. However, their contribution to the total burden of disease is less than half this – about 5 per cent and 4 per cent respectively. Lower respiratory tract infections, on the other hand, account for about the same proportion of the overall burden of disease as ischaemic heart disease and stroke despite causing less than half the number of deaths. At the extreme, lower back pain, despite never being fatal, accounts for more than 3 per cent of the overall burden of disease.

The deaths resulting from various risk factors are also a poor proxy for the proportion of the overall burden of disease that results from them. High sodium (salt), physical inactivity, obesity, and indoor air pollution each account for about 6 per cent of deaths. Indoor air pollution, however, accounts for nearly twice as many DALYs as high sodium.