Question

what is the burden of disease and how can we measure it. compare it with infant mortality rate as a mesure of preformance of health system

Answer 1

Ans) A complete and comprehensive burden of disease report must be based on a consistent set of estimates for mortality and morbidity. For this reason the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries and Risk Factors project (GBD) aims to measure population health worldwide.

- YLD = years lived with disability. The DALY is based on the premise that the best approach for measuring the burden of disease is to use units of time. Having chosen units of time as the unit of measure, the burden of disease can still be calculated using incidence or prevalence measures.

- For each disease, a DALY is calculated as: DALYs = number of people with the disease × duration of the disease (or loss of life expectancy in the case of mortality) × severity (varying from 0 for perfect health to 1 for death).

Infant mortality rate (IMR) had been criticised as a measure of population health because it could skew health resource allocation.

The disability adjusted life expectancy (DALE) was adopted in World Health Report 2000 as the preferred measure of population health.

The correlation between IMR and DALE is very high (r=0.91).

For many countries IMR may remain an effective and cheaper alternative to the theoretically more appealing DALE.