International Classification of Diseases 10th edition-based disability adjusted life years for measuring of burden of specific injury

OBJECTIVE: We aimed to develop an International Classification of Diseases (ICD) 10th edition injury code-based disability-adjusted life year (DALY) to measure the burden of specific injuries. METHODS: Three independent panels used novel methods to score disability weights (DWs) of 130 indicator codes sampled from 1,284 ICD injury codes. The DWs were interpolated into the remaining injury codes (n=1,154) to estimate DWs for all ICD injury codes. The reliability of the estimated DWs was evaluated using the test-retest method. We calculated ICD-DALYs for individual injury episodes using the DWs from the Korean National Hospital Discharge Injury Survey (HDIS, n=23,160 of 2004) database and compared them with DALY based on a global burden of disease study (GBD-DALY) regarding validation, correlation, and agreement for 32 injury categories. RESULTS: Using 130 ICD 10th edition injury indicator codes, three panels determined the DWs using the highest reliability (person trade-off 1, Spearman r=0.724, 0.788, and 0.875 for the three panel groups). The test-retest results for the reliability were excellent (Spearman r=0.932) (P<0.001). The HDIS database revealed injury burden (years) as follows: GBD-DALY (138,548), GBD-years of life disabled (130,481), and GBD-years of life lost (8,117) versus ICD-DALY (262,246), ICD-years of life disabled (255,710), and ICD-years of life lost (6,537), respectively. Spearman’s correlation coefficient of the DALYs between the two methods was 0.759 (P<0.001), and the Bland-Altman test displayed an acceptable agreement, with exception of two categories among 32 injury groups. CONCLUSION: The ICD-DALY was developed to calculate the burden of injury for all injury codes and was validated with the GBD-DALY. The ICD-DALY was higher than the GBD-DALY but showed acceptable agreement.