Greetings from Davos

Sepatuads.com   Januari 16, 2017   DALYs, Global Burden of Disease, NCD, Non-communicable disease, noncommunicable disease, Williis Towers Watson, World Economic Forum, World Health Organization   Comment  

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I am in Davos, Switzerland,  at the World Economic Forum this week.  I've been part of a Willis Towers Watson team working on using behavioral economic precepts to decrease risk factors for non-communicable disease (NCD), and will be giving a talk and moderating a panel discussion on this topic on Thursday.

A few factoids about NCDs: Source

• NCDs cost about 1.7 trillion disability adjusted life years annually
• About 80% of all NCD deaths occur in low and middle income countries
• 6 million deaths annually can be attributed to tobacco smoking. Note that the death toll from hypertension is 7.5 million deaths, and obesity causes 2.8 million deaths a year while physical inactivity is responsible for 3.2 million deaths a year.   (Many deaths have multiple risk factors - so these are attributed fractionally to the different causes.)

Disability adjusted life years (DALYs) are a good way to look at the total burden of disease, which helps describe the economic toll of NCDs.  DALYs are like quality adjusted life years-  but are focused on an equivalency of high quality life-years LOST, while QALYs (Quality Adjusted Life Years) are focused on years of high quality life gained. DALYs also include time discounting which QALYs do not.   Early iterations of DALYs gave preference to life years of young adults saved, although more recent calculations do not.

My colleague Michael Dean input data from the World Health Organization and the Institute for Health Metrics into an interactive data visualization (using Tableau).  

Here are publicly available data visualizations I'll be using at a presentation at the World Economic Forum in Davos this week. 

Data Visualization 1 shows the impact in disability adjusted life years of noncommunicable diseases by country: 

Data Visualization 2  shows how this has changed in the last quarter century. Note the increase in DALYs in less developed countries is especially high. 

Here is a brief YouTube video describing use of this data visualization tool

I expect to do some additional blogging from the World Economic Forum this week. 

From a WEF/WTW white paper.  CRD is chronic respiratory disease