Mortality landscape in the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries and Risk Factors Study

Abstract

The Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries and Risk Factors Study 2010 (GBD 2010) is an initiative that involved 486 scientists from 302 institutions in 50 countries, under the leadership of a consortium formed by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation of the University of Washington, World Health Organization, the University of Queensland School of Population Health, the Harvard School of Public Health, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the University of Tokyo and Imperial College London. The study has provided a state of the art understanding of the burden of 67 risk factors and their clusters, 291 diseases and injuries on global, regional and national levels in period from 1990 to 2010 for 187 countries. GBD 2010 estimates covered both mortality (expressed in number of deaths, years of life lost (YLL) due to premature mortality) and morbidity (mainly expressed as years lived with disability (YLD)), while the incidence and prevalence were not reported for majority of causes so far, although they were accounted and used for YLD calculations. Finally, each disease and risk factor was presented in terms of the disability-adjusted years of life (DALY) that is merely a sum of YLL and YLD. The major published results of GBD 2010 cover global and regional levels for all diseases and risk factors. Reports focused on specific conditions are also available. At country-level detailed estimates are published for UK, China and USA, and data on other countries are accessible only as aggregate partial representation via web-based tools.