TY - JOUR T1 - Quantifying burden of disease to support public health policy in Belgium: opportunities and constraints JF - BMC Public Health Y1 - 2014 A1 - Brecht Devleesschauwer A1 - Charline Maertens de Noordhout A1 - Smit, G Suzanne A A1 - Luc Duchateau A1 - Pierre Dorny A1 - Stein, Claudia A1 - Herman Van Oyen A1 - Niko Speybroeck KW - Belgium KW - Disability-Adjusted Life Years KW - Disease burden KW - HEALTH POLICY AB -

Background

To support public health policy, information on the burden of disease is essential. In recent years, the Disability-Adjusted Life Year (DALY) has emerged as the most important summary measure of public health. DALYs quantify the number of healthy life years lost due to morbidity and mortality, and thereby facilitate the comparison of the relative impact of diseases and risk factors and the monitoring of public health over time.

Discussion

Evidence on the disease burden in Belgium, expressed as DALYs, is available from international and national efforts. Non-communicable diseases and injuries dominate the overall disease burden, while dietary risks, tobacco smoking, and high body-mass index are the major risk factors for ill health. Notwithstanding these efforts, if DALYs were to be used for guiding health policy, a more systematic approach is required. By integrating DALYs in the current data generating systems, comparable estimates, rooted in recent local data, can be produced. This might however be hampered by several restrictions, such as limited harmonization, timeliness, inclusiveness and accessibility of current databases.

Summary

Routine quantification of disease burden in terms of DALYs would provide a significant added value to evidence-based public health policy in Belgium, although some hurdles need to be cleared.

VL - 14 UR - http://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2458-14-1196 CP - 1196 J1 - BMC Public Health M3 - 10.1186/1471-2458-14-1196 ER -