BACKGROUND China and India jointly account for 38% of the world population, so understanding the burden attributed to mental, neurological, and substance use disorders within these two countries is essential. As part of the Lancet/Lancet Psychiatry China-India Mental Health Alliance Series, we aim to provide estimates of the burden of mental, neurological, and substance use disorders for China ...

BACKGROUND Prevention and control of disease and injury require information about the leading medical causes of illness and exposures or risk factors. The assessment of the public-health importance of these has been hampered by the lack of common methods to investigate the overall, worldwide burden. The Global Burden of Disease Study (GBD) provides a standardised approach to epidemiological ass...

Background The global burden of disease (GBD) 2010 study used a universal set of disability weights to estimate disability adjusted life years (DALYs) by country. However, it is not clear whether these weights can be applied universally in calculating DALYs to inform local decision-making. This study derived disability weights for a resource-constrained community in Cape Town, South Africa, and...

BACKGROUND In calculations of burden of disease using disability-adjusted life years, disability weights are needed to quantify health losses relating to non-fatal outcomes, expressed as years lived with disability. In 2012 a new set of global disability weights was published for the Global Burden of Disease 2010 (GBD 2010) study. That study suggested that comparative assessments of different h...

BACKGROUND Leptospirosis, a spirochaetal zoonosis, occurs in diverse epidemiological settings and affects vulnerable populations, such as rural subsistence farmers and urban slum dwellers. Although leptospirosis can cause life-threatening disease, there is no global burden of disease estimate in terms of Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) available. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS We utili...

BACKGROUND Years of Life Lost (YLL) is one of the methods used to estimate the duration of time lost due to premature death. While previous studies of disease burden have been reported using YLL, there have been no studies investigating YLL of Yi people in rural China. Yunnan Province ranks first in terms of Yi people in China. This paper uses YLL to estimate the disease burden of Yi people in ...

The publication of the updated Global Burden of Disease (GBD) [1,2] provides a broad overview of the challenges to global health. As with the previous surveys [3], it is likely that over the coming years, the GBD will be used (and abused) to justify greater resources to combat different diseases. Whatever concerns there might exist about the robustness of the data, in the absence of any other s...

OBJECTIVE To calculate the effect of using two different sets of disability weights for estimates of disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) averted by interventions delivered in one hospital in India. METHODS DALYs averted by surgical and non-surgical interventions were estimated for 3445 patients who were admitted to a 106-bed private hospital in a semi-urban area of northern India in 2012-2...