The Global Burden of Disease (GBD) provides systematic epidemiological estimates for an unprecedented 150 major health conditions. The GBD provides indispensable global and regional data for health planning, research, and education.

The Global Burden of Disease (GBD) provides systematic epidemiological estimates for an unprecedented 150 major health conditions. The GBD provides indispensable global and regional data for health planning, research, and education.

The Global Burden of Disease (GBD) provides systematic epidemiological estimates for an unprecedented 150 major health conditions. The GBD provides indispensable global and regional data for health planning, research, and education.

The global burden of disease: 2004 update is a comprehensive assessment of the health of the world's population. It provides detailed global and regional estimates of premature mortality, disability and loss of health for 135 causes by age and sex, drawing on extensive WHO databases and on information provided by Member States.--Publisher description.

Strategic health planning, the cornerstone of initiatives designed to achieve health improvement goals around the world, requires an understanding of the comparative burden of diseases and injuries, their corresponding risk factors and the likely effects of invervention options. The Global Burden of Disease framework, originally published in 1990, has been widely adopted as the preferred method for health accounting and has become the standard to guide the setting of health research priorities. This publication sets out an updated assessment of the situation, with an analysis of trends observed since 1990 and a chapter on the sensitivity of GBD estimates to various sources of uncertainty in methods and data.

Mental, neurological, and substance use disorders are common, highly disabling, and associated with significant premature mortality. The impact of these disorders on the social and economic well-being of individuals, families, and societies is large, growing, and underestimated. Despite this burden, these disorders have been systematically neglected, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, with pitifully small contributions to scaling up cost-effective prevention and treatment strategies. Systematically compiling the substantial existing knowledge to address this inequity is the central goal of this volume. This evidence-base can help policy makers in resource-constrained settings as they prioritize programs and interventions to address these disorders.

"In this volume, a group of leading philosophers, economists, epidemiologists, and policy scholars continue a twenty-year discussion of philosophical questions connected to the Global Burden of Disease Study (GBD), one of the largest-scale research collaborations in global health. Chapters explore issues in ethics, political philosophy, metaphysics, the philosophy of economics, and the philosophy of medicine. Some chapters identify previously-unappreciated aspects of the GBD, including the way it handles causation and aggregates complex data; while others offer fresh perspectives on frequently-discussed topics such as discounting, age-weighting, and the valuation of health states. The volume concludes with a set of chapters discussing how epidemiological data should and shouldn't be used"--