The concept of the quality-adjusted life year (QALY) provides a simple technical tool for summarising the impact a medical condition has on someone's life and the impact a health care intervention can have on that medical condition. In the former case, QALYs (and related concepts, such as disability-adjusted life years, DALYs) have been useful in producing summary statistics on the burden of di...

The main objective of this study is to estimate a part of road traffic injury costs including costs due to fatality and disability, which are related to lost social products. Lost output consists of costs, which are related to losses of national product or lost-income in death, hospitalization or physical disabilities. In recent years, the Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) has been used as...

Disability-adjusted life years (DALYs)—a frequent indicator for assessment of the relative eff ects of public-health interventions—explicitly incorporate disability. This Viewpoint will argue, however, that the notion of disability embodied in DALYs does not accord with that in WHO’s International Classifi cation of Functioning, Disability, and Health (ICF). Underlying this inconsistency is the...

BACKGROUND Chronic illness and disability are of increasing public health importance but little is known about the lifetime influences involved in their onset and progression. We aim to (i) establish whether an individual's rating of limiting illness is stable over a 10-year period from age 23 to 33; (ii) assess the relationship between childhood and adult disability; and (iii) identify lifecou...

INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVES The health indicator disability-adjusted life years combines the fatal and nonfatal consequences of a disease in a single measure. The aim of this study was to evaluate the burden of ischemic heart disease in 2008 in Spain by calculating disability-adjusted life years. METHODS The years of life lost due to premature death were calculated using the ischemic heart di...

This issue of the Journal features two articles on alcohol. The article 1 by Connor et al details the large health burden from alcohol in New Zealand at an estimated 5.4% of all deaths under 80 years old (around 800 premature deaths annually). They also estimated 6.5% of all healthy life lost among 0–79 year olds in 2004 was attributable to alcohol (a loss of around 28,000 disability-adjusted l...

OBJECTIVES The effects of non-occupational physical activity were assessed on the number of years lived with and without disability between age 50 and 80 years. METHODS Using the GLOBE study and the Longitudinal Study of Aging, multi-state life tables were constructed yielding the number of years with and without disability between age 50 and 80 years. To obtain life tables by level of physic...