Disease burden is the impact of a health problem on an area measured by financial cost, mortality, morbidity, or other indicators. It is often quantified in terms of quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) or disability-adjusted life years (DALYs), both of which quantify the number of years lost due to disease. One DALY can be thought of as one year of healthy life lost, and the overall disease burden can be thought of as a measure of the gap between current health status and the ideal health status, where the individual lives to old age free from disease and disability. These measures allow for comparison of disease burden, and have also been used to forecast the possible impacts of health interventions.
The environmental burden of disease is defined as the number of DALYs that can be attributed to environmental factors.
World Health Organization (WHO) has provided a set of detailed guidelines for measuring disease burden at the local or national level.
A related concept used by WHO is years lost due to disability (YLD), which measures the years of what could have been a healthy life that were instead spent in states of less than full health. In 2004, the leading cause of YLD worldwide (i.e. leading to the most years lost) for both men and women was unipolar depression.
Read more about Disease Burden: Statistics, History, Modifiable Risk Factors, Estimating The Burden, Implementation and Interpretation, General Significance
Famous quotes containing the words disease and/or burden:
“Your responsibility as a parent is not as great as you might imagine. You need not supply the world with the next conqueror of disease or a major movie star. If your child simply grows up to be someone who does not use the word “collectible” as a noun, you can consider yourself an unqualified success.”
—Fran Lebowitz (20th century)
“What makes loneliness an anguish
Is not that I have no one to share my burden,
But this:
I have only my own burden to bear.”
—Dag Hammarskjöld (1905–1961)