Disability-adjusted life year

[2] Disability-adjusted life years are a societal measure of the disease or disability burden in populations.

Traditionally, health liabilities were expressed using one measure, the years of life lost (YLL) due to dying early.

"[6] At the population level, the disease burden as measured by DALYs is calculated by adding YLL to YLD.

[10][11] The World Health Organization (WHO) used age weighting and time discounting at 3 percent in DALYs prior to 2010 but discontinued using them starting in 2010.

Some criticize, while others rationalize, this as reflecting society's interest in productivity and receiving a return on its investment in raising children.

[17] The effects of the interplay between life expectancy and years lost, discounting, and social weighting are complex, depending on the severity and duration of illness.

[18] As a result of numerous discussions, by 2010 the World Health Organization had abandoned the ideas of age weighting and time discounting.

However, HALYs, including DALYs and QALYs, are especially useful in guiding the allocation of health resources as they provide a common numerator, allowing for the expression of utility in terms of dollar/DALY, or dollar/QALY.

[19] DALYs can also be used to estimate the 'value of lost welfare' (VLW) as a dollar amount when combined with data on the maximum cost individuals are willing to pay to prevent death, such as multiplying age-specific DALYs by the willingness to pay at that age, summing the values to give the VLW of the total population.

For example, the total economic value lost due to stroke was estimated to amount to $2 trillion globally in 2019.

Cancer (25.1/1,000), cardiovascular (23.8/1,000), mental problems (17.6/1,000), neurological (15.7/1,000), chronic respiratory (9.4/1,000) and diabetes (7.2/1,000) are the main causes of good years of expected life lost to disease or premature death.

These illustrate the problematic diseases and outbreaks occurring in 2013 in Zimbabwe, shown to have the greatest impact on health disability were typhoid, anthrax, malaria, common diarrhea, and dysentery.

Overall, 66% of the sample worked in the manufacturing sector and represented 70% of healthy years lost by all workers.

[24] It is now a key measure employed by the United Nations World Health Organization in such publications as its Global Burden of Disease.

Some critics have alleged that DALYs are essentially an economic measure of human productive capacity for the affected individual.

Perinatal conditions, which affect infants with a very low age-weight function, are the leading cause of lost DALYs at 90.48 million.

Disability-adjusted life years lost per 100,000 inhabitants in 2004: [ 1 ]
No data
Fewer than 9,250
9,250–16,000
16,000–22,750
22,750–29,500
29,500–36,250
36,250–43,000
43,000–49,750
49,750–56,500
56,500–63,250
63,250–70,000
70,000–80,000
More than 80,000
See formula for calculation of DALYs in text, figure emphasizes that DALYs are cumulative and may result from temporary disability at different points in lifespan in addition to permanent disability
Some studies use DALYs calculated to place greater value on a year lived as a young adult. This formula produces average values around age 10 and age 55, a peak around age 25, and lowest values among very young children and very old people. [ 12 ]