| Definition |
Disability Adjusted Life Years lost – a measure of burden of disease now in common use.
In order to capture the impact of both premature death and disability in a single measure, a common unit “time” is used: time (in years) lost through premature death, and time (in years) lived with a disability. For the Global Burden of Disease GBD, a unit called the Disability-Adjusted Life Year (DALY) has been developed. The DALY expresses years of life lost to premature death and years lived with a disability of specified severity and duration. One DALY is thus one lost year of healthy life. Here, a “premature” death is defined as one that occurs before the age to which the dying person could have expected to survive if they were a member of a standardized model population with a life expectancy at birth equal to that of the world’s longest-surviving population, Japan. |
