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Cite the article as: Malekzadeh R. Global burden of disease study 2010: A real advance in global descriptive epidemiology: Perspective for developing countries. Arch Iran Med. 2014; 17(5): 302 - 303.
The Global Burden of Disease Study 2010 (GBD 2010) is to date the largest epidemiologic study on major illnesses and injuries. The study includes several millions of observations on risk factors, causes of death, mortality, injury and disease incidence and prevalence during a 5 year period with more than 400 contributing scientists across the globe. The study has developed novel metrics that quantify not only the disease but also "health", and so makes it possible to compare health status in different countries in different regions of the world at different times. GBD metrics measure both disease occurrences and death events. They further quantify years lived with disability (YLD) and years of life lost (YLL) as a result of premature death. By adding these two metrics, GBD reports disability adjusted life year (DALYs) as an indicator of quality of life. The GBD study enables scientists to investigate the impact of risk factors on health for both patients and community at large and highlights the importance of various risk factors leading to disability and death. The innovative ensemble of quantitative methods used in GBD 2010 allowed "imputing" data for places and times where data were not obtainable. One feature of the sophisticated methodology of GBD study was to manage inconsistencies in data and outliers.1-5
Christopher Murray and his colleagues from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, Seattle, WA, USA (IHME) with collaboration from a collection of noble research departments across the world should be praised for their remarkable accomplishments in advancing our knowledge of global descriptive epidemiology.1-5 This landmark study, aiming to promote global and country-level assessment of disease burden, helps policy makers in making decisions to improve the health of nations.
In this issue of AIM, Naghavi, Shahraz and Forouzanfar, along with their co-authors, have tried to use the data from GBD 2010 to estimate causes of death and morbidity with epidemiologic transition toward chronic diseases in Iran and its comparison with 20 countries in the region.6-8 They have tried to estimate the burden of 67 risk factors and 291 diseases for three...