The Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2015 provided a synthesis of the evidence for risk factor exposure and the attributable burden of disease. Dr. Krueger was one of the collaborators on this global research project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Global, regional, and national comparative risk assessment of 79 behavioural, environmental and occupational, and metabolic risks or clusters of risks, 1990-2015; a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2015
GBD 2015 Risk Factors Collaborators. Lancet 2016; 388, 1659-724.
The data captured premature death and disability from more than 300 diseases and injuries in 195 countries, by age and sex, from 1990 to 2015, allowing comparisons over time, across age groups, and among populations.
The flexible design of the GBD machinery allowed for regular updates as new data and epidemiological studies were made available. In that way, the tools could be used at the global, national, and local levels to understand health trends over time.
Global Study finds Massive Health Care Inequity
The GBD Study found massive inequity of access to and quality of health care among and within countries, and concluded that people were dying from causes with well-known treatments.
Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation
For more information on the Global Burden of Disease study, refer to the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation. The following information was excerpted from their site.
Everyone, all over the world, deserves to live a long life in full health. In order to achieve this goal, we need a comprehensive picture of what disables and kills people across countries, time, age, and sex. The Global Burden of Disease (GBD) provides a tool to quantify health loss from hundreds of diseases, injuries, and risk factors, so that health systems can be improved and disparities can be eliminated.
In order to align health systems with the populations they serve, policymakers first need to understand the true nature of their country’s health challenges – and how those challenges are shifting over time. That means more than just estimating disease prevalence, such as the number of people with depression or diabetes in a population.
GBD research incorporated both the prevalence of a given disease or risk factor and the relative harm it caused. The tools allowed decision-makers to compare the effects of different diseases, such as malaria versus cancer, and then use that information at home. To make these results more accessible and useful, IHME distilled large amounts of complicated information into a suite of interactive data visualizations that allowed people to make sense of the over 1 billion data points generated.