But death is only one factor in the grand scheme of disease severity and cost. Many conditions, such as back pain, depression or even acne, can severely hinder a person’s day-to-day life.
To account for this, Harvard and the World Bank created the Disability-Adjusted Life Year metric, or DALY, in 1990, which has subsequently been used by the World Health Organization. This attempts to represent a broader scope of the personal and societal costs that diseases can have, not only limited to the deaths they cause. According to the WHO, “one DALY can be thought of as one lost year of ‘healthy’ life.”
For example, if you die of lung cancer at 69 instead of the U.S. average life expectancy of 78.7, that would cause a burden, or loss, of nearly ten disability-adjusted life years on society. Conversely, if you develop debilitating neck pain and can’t work for a year, but then surgery or therapy help you return healthy life afterward, the disease still caused a burden of one disability-adjusted life year.
The WHO quantifies the burden of a disease by summing all the disability-adjusted life years it causes in a country’s population.
The experts at HealthGrove, a health data analysis and visualization site that's part of Graphiq, decided to look at this burden of disease data from the Global Health Data Exchange (most recently released in 2013) to determine the worst, non-deadly health conditions.
When people think of the
“worst” health conditions, they often think of diseases that cause the
most deaths or kill the most quickly.
But death is only one factor in the grand scheme of disease severity and cost. Many conditions, such as back pain, depression or even acne, can severely hinder a person’s day-to-day life.
To account for this, Harvard and the World Bank created the Disability-Adjusted Life Year metric, or DALY, in 1990, which has subsequently been used by the World Health Organization. This attempts to represent a broader scope of the personal and societal costs that diseases can have, not only limited to the deaths they cause. According to the WHO, “one DALY can be thought of as one lost year of ‘healthy’ life.”
For example, if you die of lung cancer at 69 instead of the U.S. average life expectancy of 78.7, that would cause a burden, or loss, of nearly ten disability-adjusted life years on society. Conversely, if you develop debilitating neck pain and can’t work for a year, but then surgery or therapy help you return healthy life afterward, the disease still caused a burden of one disability-adjusted life year.
The WHO quantifies the burden of a disease by summing all the disability-adjusted life years it causes in a country’s population.
The experts at HealthGrove, a health data analysis and visualization site that's part of Graphiq, decided to look at this burden of disease data from the Global Health Data Exchange (most recently released in 2013) to determine the worst, non-deadly health conditions.
But death is only one factor in the grand scheme of disease severity and cost. Many conditions, such as back pain, depression or even acne, can severely hinder a person’s day-to-day life.
To account for this, Harvard and the World Bank created the Disability-Adjusted Life Year metric, or DALY, in 1990, which has subsequently been used by the World Health Organization. This attempts to represent a broader scope of the personal and societal costs that diseases can have, not only limited to the deaths they cause. According to the WHO, “one DALY can be thought of as one lost year of ‘healthy’ life.”
For example, if you die of lung cancer at 69 instead of the U.S. average life expectancy of 78.7, that would cause a burden, or loss, of nearly ten disability-adjusted life years on society. Conversely, if you develop debilitating neck pain and can’t work for a year, but then surgery or therapy help you return healthy life afterward, the disease still caused a burden of one disability-adjusted life year.
The WHO quantifies the burden of a disease by summing all the disability-adjusted life years it causes in a country’s population.
The experts at HealthGrove, a health data analysis and visualization site that's part of Graphiq, decided to look at this burden of disease data from the Global Health Data Exchange (most recently released in 2013) to determine the worst, non-deadly health conditions.
For example, if you die of lung cancer at 69 instead of the U.S. average life expectancy of 78.7, that would cause a burden, or loss, of nearly ten disability-adjusted life years on society. Conversely, if you develop debilitating neck pain and can’t work for a year, but then surgery or therapy help you return healthy life afterward, the disease still caused a burden of one disability-adjusted life year.
The WHO quantifies the burden of a disease by summing all the disability-adjusted life years it causes in a country’s population.
The experts at HealthGrove, a health data analysis and visualization site that's part of Graphiq, decided to look at this burden of disease data from the Global Health Data Exchange (most recently released in 2013) to determine the worst, non-deadly health conditions.
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