Abstract
Disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) constitute a member of the family of composite health outcome measures, that further includes measures such as the Healthy Life Expectancy, Disability-Adjusted Life Expectancy and Quality Adjusted Life-years. DALYs are essentially a combination of Years of Life Lost due to mortality (YLL) and Years of Life lost due to Disability (YLD) by a population. YLD are weighted for the severity of specified disabilities using disease-specific disability weights between 0 (no disability) and 1 (extreme disability).
DALYs were developed in the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study that provided quantitative, internally consistent estimates of the burden of the disease, including non-fatal health outcomes, attributable to 107 causes, per sex, for different age groups, and per region of the world, in 1990. The GBD study has demonstrated the potential value of combining data about length of life and severity of disease in a single comprehensive measure. Descriptions of the population's health with the help of such a measure may serve as a source of information for public health policy and for prioritizing and planning health care and health services research.
Recently, a coherent set of disability weights for 52 diseases that constitute the major part of ill-health in the Netherlands was derived in the Dutch Disability Weights study, and applied in Dutch burden of disease estimates in the Dutch Public Health Status and Forecast 1997 study.
The present paper provides an introduction on the DALY approach by discussing some of the methods and the results of the Global Burden of Disease study, and introducing the Dutch Disability Weights study and the burden of disease estimates in the Dutch Public Health Status and Forecast 1997 study.
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