Disability Weights Measurement for 289 Causes of Disease Considering Disease Severity in Korea

BACKGROUND: For the Korean Burden of Disease (KBD) 2015 study, we have amended disability weights for causes of disease adapting the methodology of the KBD disability weight 2012 study. METHODS: We conducted a self-administered web-based survey in Korea using ranking five causes of disease. A total of 605 physicians and medical college students who were attending in third or fourth grade of a regular course performed the survey. We converted the ranked data into paired comparison data and ran a probit regression. The predicted probabilities for each cause of disease were calculated from the coefficient estimates of the probit regression. ‘Being dead (1)’ and ‘Full health (0)’ were utilized as anchor points to rescale the predicted probability on a scale from 0 to 1. RESULTS: As a result, disability weights for a total of 289 causes of disease were estimated. In particular, we calculated the disability weights of 60 causes of disease considering severity level. These results show that prejudice about the severity of cause of disease itself can affect the estimation of disability weight, when estimating the disability weight for causes of disease without consideration of severity. Furthermore, we have shown that disability weights can be estimated based on a ranking method which can maximize efficiency of data collection. CONCLUSION: Disability weights from this study can be used to estimate disability adjusted life year and healthy life expectancy. Furthermore, we expected that the use of the ranking method will increase gradually in disability weight studies.