Disability-adjusted-life-years lost (DALYs) is a common outcome metric for cost-effectiveness analyses, and the equations used for such calculations have been presented previously by Fox-Rushby and Hanson (see, e.g., "Health Policy and Planning 16:326-331, 2001"). While the equations are clear, the logic behind them is opaque at best for a large share of public health practitioners and students...

The disability adjusted life year (DALY) has been employed to quantify the burden of diseases. This measure allows for combining in a single indicator "years of life lived with disabilities (YLD)" and "years of life lost from premature death (YLL)" . The present communication attempts to estimate the burden of cancers in-terms of YLL, YLD and DALY for "all sites" and leading sites of cancer in ...

Stroke is a prototype disorder that disables as well as kills people. The disability-adjusted life years (DALY) metric developed by the World Health Organization to measure the global burden of disease integrates healthy life years lost due to both premature mortality and living with disability. Accordingly, it is well suited to stroke research. The DALY has previously been applied only to larg...

Recent data from the medical literature and other sources were used in an analysis of the cost-effectiveness of coronary artery bypass graft surgery (CABG) in symptomatic patients. Health effectiveness was expressed as the gain in quality-adjusted life expectancy, allowing for a range of subjective weights attached to symptomatic benefits. Costs included those of surgery, medical management of ...

Data continue to emerge demonstrating the poor quality of life of ICU survivors in the months and years following critical illness. In this issue of Critical Care, Cuthbertson and colleagues present new data on quality of life from a cohort of ICU survivors who were followed for 5 years. They found that survivors had poor physical quality of life and low quality adjusted life-years in compariso...

Economic burdens of injuries at the country level are unknown. In the current study we tried to explore the economic burden of DALYs loss due to injuries at the country level, then distributed according to the World Bank’s income groups. Methods: Data from the World Bank and the World Health Organization websites were used. Disability adjusted life year (DALY) and gross domestic product (GDP) p...

BACKGROUND Compared with single-chamber ventricular pacing, dual-chamber pacing can reduce adverse events and, as a result, improve quality of life in patients paced for sick sinus syndrome. It is not clear, however, how these benefits compare with the increased cost of dual-chamber pacemakers. METHODS AND RESULTS We used 4-year data from a 2010-patient, randomized trial to estimate the incre...