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Conducting national burden of disease studies in small countries in Europe– a feasible challenge?

BACKGROUND: Burden of Disease (BoD) studies use disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) as a population health metric to quantify the years of life lost due to morbidity and premature mortality for diseases, injuries and risk factors occurring in a region or a country. Small countries usually face a...

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Autores principales: Cuschieri, Sarah, Pallari, Elena, Terzic, Natasa, Alkerwi, Ala’a, Sigurvinsdottir, Rannveig, Sigfusdottir, Inga Dora, Devleesschauwer, Brecht
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8112005/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33971960
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13690-021-00599-z
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author Cuschieri, Sarah
Pallari, Elena
Terzic, Natasa
Alkerwi, Ala’a
Sigurvinsdottir, Rannveig
Sigfusdottir, Inga Dora
Devleesschauwer, Brecht
author_facet Cuschieri, Sarah
Pallari, Elena
Terzic, Natasa
Alkerwi, Ala’a
Sigurvinsdottir, Rannveig
Sigfusdottir, Inga Dora
Devleesschauwer, Brecht
author_sort Cuschieri, Sarah
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Burden of Disease (BoD) studies use disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) as a population health metric to quantify the years of life lost due to morbidity and premature mortality for diseases, injuries and risk factors occurring in a region or a country. Small countries usually face a number of challenges to conduct epidemiological studies, such as national BoD studies, due to the lack of specific expertise and resources or absence of adequate data. Considering Europe’s small countries of Cyprus, Iceland, Luxembourg, Malta and Montenegro, the aim was to assess whether the various national data sources identified are appropriate to perform national BoD studies. MAIN BODY: The five small countries have a well-established mortality registers following the ICD10 classification, which makes calculation of years of life lost (YLL) feasible. A number of health information data sources were identified in each country, which can provide prevalence data for the calculation of years lived with disability (YLD) for various conditions. These sources include disease-specific registers, hospital discharge data, primary health care data and epidemiological studies, provided by different organisations such as health directorates, institutes of public health, statistical offices and other bodies. Hence, DALYs can be estimated at a national level through the combination of the YLL and YLD information. On the other hand, small countries face unique challenges such as difficulty to ensure sample representativeness, variations in prevalence estimates especially for rarer diseases, existence of a substantial proportion of non-residents affiliated to healthcare systems and potential exclusion from some European or international initiatives. Recently established BoD networks may provide a platform for small countries to share experiences, expertise, and engage with countries and institutions that have long-standing experience with BoD assessment. CONCLUSION: Apart from mortality registries, adequate health data sources, notably for cancer, are potentially available at the small states to perform national BoD studies. Investing in sharing expert knowledge through engagement of researchers in BoD networks can enable the conduct of country specific BoD studies and the establishment of more accurate DALYs estimates. Such estimates can enable local policymakers to reflect on the relative burden of the different conditions that are contributing to morbidity and mortality at a country level.
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spelling pubmed-81120052021-05-11 Conducting national burden of disease studies in small countries in Europe– a feasible challenge? Cuschieri, Sarah Pallari, Elena Terzic, Natasa Alkerwi, Ala’a Sigurvinsdottir, Rannveig Sigfusdottir, Inga Dora Devleesschauwer, Brecht Arch Public Health Commentary BACKGROUND: Burden of Disease (BoD) studies use disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) as a population health metric to quantify the years of life lost due to morbidity and premature mortality for diseases, injuries and risk factors occurring in a region or a country. Small countries usually face a number of challenges to conduct epidemiological studies, such as national BoD studies, due to the lack of specific expertise and resources or absence of adequate data. Considering Europe’s small countries of Cyprus, Iceland, Luxembourg, Malta and Montenegro, the aim was to assess whether the various national data sources identified are appropriate to perform national BoD studies. MAIN BODY: The five small countries have a well-established mortality registers following the ICD10 classification, which makes calculation of years of life lost (YLL) feasible. A number of health information data sources were identified in each country, which can provide prevalence data for the calculation of years lived with disability (YLD) for various conditions. These sources include disease-specific registers, hospital discharge data, primary health care data and epidemiological studies, provided by different organisations such as health directorates, institutes of public health, statistical offices and other bodies. Hence, DALYs can be estimated at a national level through the combination of the YLL and YLD information. On the other hand, small countries face unique challenges such as difficulty to ensure sample representativeness, variations in prevalence estimates especially for rarer diseases, existence of a substantial proportion of non-residents affiliated to healthcare systems and potential exclusion from some European or international initiatives. Recently established BoD networks may provide a platform for small countries to share experiences, expertise, and engage with countries and institutions that have long-standing experience with BoD assessment. CONCLUSION: Apart from mortality registries, adequate health data sources, notably for cancer, are potentially available at the small states to perform national BoD studies. Investing in sharing expert knowledge through engagement of researchers in BoD networks can enable the conduct of country specific BoD studies and the establishment of more accurate DALYs estimates. Such estimates can enable local policymakers to reflect on the relative burden of the different conditions that are contributing to morbidity and mortality at a country level. BioMed Central 2021-05-11 /pmc/articles/PMC8112005/ /pubmed/33971960 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13690-021-00599-z Text en © The Author(s) 2021 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) ) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
spellingShingle Commentary
Cuschieri, Sarah
Pallari, Elena
Terzic, Natasa
Alkerwi, Ala’a
Sigurvinsdottir, Rannveig
Sigfusdottir, Inga Dora
Devleesschauwer, Brecht
Conducting national burden of disease studies in small countries in Europe– a feasible challenge?
title Conducting national burden of disease studies in small countries in Europe– a feasible challenge?
title_full Conducting national burden of disease studies in small countries in Europe– a feasible challenge?
title_fullStr Conducting national burden of disease studies in small countries in Europe– a feasible challenge?
title_full_unstemmed Conducting national burden of disease studies in small countries in Europe– a feasible challenge?
title_short Conducting national burden of disease studies in small countries in Europe– a feasible challenge?
title_sort conducting national burden of disease studies in small countries in europe– a feasible challenge?
topic Commentary
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8112005/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33971960
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13690-021-00599-z
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