The goal of this research was to estimate deaths and years of lives lost (YLLs) by age, sex, and region for 235 causes at two points in time – 1990 and 2010. This information can be used to better inform global efforts to assess whether society is or is not making progress in reducing the burden of premature – and especially avoidable – mortality.
The goal of this study is to calculate what proportion of deaths or disability‐adjusted life years (DALYs) can be attributed to specific risk factors, holding other independent factors unchanged. Quantification of the disease burden caused by different risks informs prevention by identifying which risks make the greatest contribution to poor health. No complete revision of global burden of disease caused by risk factors has been done since a comparative risk assessment in 2000, and no previous analysis has assessed changes in burden attributable to risk factors over time.
Individuals, households, and health systems devote enormous resources to curing, preventing, and eliminating non‐fatal, disabling health conditions. Therefore, it is essential that some form of measuring and tracking non‐fatal burdens be available for policy and planning purposes.
The number of deaths in each age and sex group for countries, regions, and the world is a critical starting point for assessing the Global Burden of Disease (GBD). A careful estimation of deaths and mortality rates by age and sex is essential to assess progress, improve health, and extend the lives of people around the world. Information about mortality rates and causes of death at different ages, especially premature mortality, is also an important impetus for public policy action.
Healthy life expectancy, or HALE, is a measure of average population health summarizing both mortality and non‐fatal outcomes. HALE is used for comparisons of health across countries or for measuring change over time. These comparisons can shed light on key questions about how morbidity worsens or improves as mortality declines.
Measurement of the global burden of disease using disability‐adjusted life years (DALYs) requires disability weights that measure health losses for all non‐fatal consequences of disease and injury. There has been vigorous debate over the definition and measurement of these weights. The primary objective was a comprehensive re‐estimation of disability weights through a large‐scale, population‐based, empirical investigation in which judgments about health loss associated with many causes were elicited from the general public in diverse communities. This is a marked improvement over previous efforts, which relied solely upon judgments from a small group of health professionals.
In this paper, results on years lost due to premature mortality (YLLs) and years lived with disability (YLDs) are combined to examine the overall burden of disease across 291 diseases and injuries by country for the period 1990 to 2010.
Between 1990 and 2010, the U.S ranking in neonatal mortality slipped from 29th to 45th among countries globally. Our objective is to measure the extent to which trends and subnational variation in early neonatal mortality reflect differences in the prevalence of risk factors (gestational age and birth weight) compared to differences in clinical care.
This engenders the hypothesis that population density positively affects coverage rates of health services. This hypothesis has been tested indirectly for some services at a local level, but not at a national level.
In this working paper, we review past work on health inequalities and propose concrete ways in which countries can implement systems to measure, monitor and ultimately reduce inequalities in health.
This paper estimates the causal effect of distance to health facility on institutional delivery in rural India, taking into account the endogenous placement of the health facility. We find that women living closer to health facilities are more likely to give birth at health facility.
Technology Review’s annual TR35 list honors Abraham Flaxman for pioneering improvements in measuring disease and gauging the effectiveness of health programs.
While many Americans reported losing weight between 2008 and 2009, the actual prevalence of obesity in the United States increased over this time period, according to researchers at IHME. Results from the study “In denial: misperceptions of weight change among adults in the United States” show that public health officials should interpret self-reported weight losses with caution.
New data published in the study “Developing a comprehensive time series of GDP per capita for 210 countries from 1950 to 2015” track gross domestic product (GDP) over six decades. Researchers from IHME used models to fill in gaps in time and across 210 countries for existing GDP datasets and created two new GDP time series.
At GroundSwell: A Night for Global Health, IHME Director Dr. Christopher Murray discusses the preliminary results from the upcoming Global Burden of Disease 2010 Study.
IHME Director Dr. Christopher Murray presents the results of an analysis of ways to reduce child deaths at the USAID Child Survival Call to Action in Washington, DC.
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and IHME are launching an innovative, multiyear collaboration to create an integrated tracking system to monitor the health status of Saudi citizens and to inform health policy priorities.
IHME's county-by-county estimates of life expectancy released in April 2012 show that women’s lifespans are improving at a much slower pace than men's nationwide.
In 2009, the influenza vaccination coverage level in the United States was 69% in adults 65 years and older but only 32% in adults between the ages of 18 and 64. This study was conducted to inform future vaccination strategies by identifying the characteristics of people who are less likely to receive influenza vaccination.
A paper co-authored by Dr. Abraham Flaxman, Assistant Professor at IHME, has been given a Best Paper Award by ACM DEV 2012, the Second Annual Symposium on Computing for Development.
Malaria caused over 1.2 million deaths worldwide in 2010, twice the number found in the most recent comprehensive study of the disease. While malaria is traditionally considered a childhood disease, this study shows that there is a significant disease burden in adults.
Malaria is killing more people worldwide than previously thought, but the number of deaths has fallen rapidly as efforts to combat the disease have ramped up.
This study proposes five general principles for cause of death model development, validation, and reporting and details an analytical tool – the Cause of Death Ensemble model (CODEm) – that explores a large number of possible models to estimate trends in causes of death. CODEm produces better estimates of cause of death trends than previous methods.
