Showing papers by "Christopher J L Murray published in 2006"
TL;DR: Despite uncertainties about mortality and burden of disease estimates, the findings suggest that substantial gains in health have been achieved in most populations, countered by the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Sub-Saharan Africa and setbacks in adult mortality in countries of the former Soviet Union.
5,168 citations
TL;DR: Global Burden of Disease and Risk Factors examines the comparative importance of diseases, injuries, and risk factors; it incorporates a range of new data sources to develop consistent estimates of incidence, prevalence, severity and duration, and mortality for 136 major diseases and injuries.
Abstract: This volume is a single up-to-date source on the entire global epidemiology of diseases, injuries and risk factors with a comprehensive statement of methods and a complete presentation of results. It includes refined methods to assess data, ensure epidemiological consistency, and summarize the disease burden. Global Burden of Disease and Risk Factors examines the comparative importance of diseases, injuries, and risk factors; it incorporates a range of new data sources to develop consistent estimates of incidence, prevalence, severity and duration, and mortality for 136 major diseases and injuries. Drawing from more than 8,500 data sources that include epidemiological studies, disease registers, and notifications systems, this book incorporates information from more than 10,000 datasets relating to population health and mortality, representing one of the largest syntheses of global information on population health to date.
2,696 citations
TL;DR: Disparities in mortality across the eight Americas, each consisting of millions or tens of millions of Americans, are enormous by all international standards and will have to be at least partly addressed through public health strategies that reduce risk factors for chronic diseases and injuries.
Abstract: Background The gap between the highest and lowest life expectancies for race-county combinations in the United States is over 35 y. We divided the race-county combinations of the US population into eight distinct groups, referred to as the ‘‘eight Americas,’’ to explore the causes of the disparities that can inform specific public health intervention policies and programs.
745 citations
01 Jan 2006
TL;DR: The Global Burden of Disease (GBD) 2001 as discussed by the authors provides an overview of the global and regional results for causes of disease and injury and provides a starting point for disease-specific economic and intervention analyses.
Abstract: This chapter documents the data sources and methods used to prepare the GBD 2001 estimates for DCP2 and provides an overview of the global and regional results for causes of disease and injury. The results presented here are those DCP2 used as a starting point for disease-specific economic and intervention analyses. The GBD 2001 incorporates a range of new data sources for developing internally consistent estimates of incidence, health state prevalence, severity, duration, and mortality for 136 major causes by sex and by eight age groups. It estimates deaths by cause, age, and sex for 226 countries and territories drawing on a total of 770 country-years of death registration data, as well as 535 additional sources of information on levels of child and adult mortality and in excess of 2,700 data sets providing information on specific causes of death in regions not well covered by death registration systems. Estimates of incidence, prevalence, severity, duration, and DALYs by cause, age, and sex drew on more than 8,500 data sources, including epidemiological studies, disease registers, and notification systems.
681 citations
TL;DR: This analysis of the empirical record of the 1918-20 pandemic provides a plausible upper bound on pandemic mortality, indicating that most deaths will occur in poor countries--ie, in societies whose scarce health resources are already stretched by existing health priorities.
572 citations
01 Jan 2006
TL;DR: This chapter begins with a brief history of the work on burden of disease, including a discussion of the nature and origins of the disability-adjusted life year (DALY) as a measure of disease burden, and summarizes the methods and findings of the 2001 GBD study.
Abstract: This chapter begins with a brief history of the work on burden of disease, including a discussion of the nature and origins of the disability-adjusted life year (DALY) as a measure of disease burden. Next it discusses applications of burden of disease analysis to the formulation of health policy. The chapter then summarizes the methods and findings of the 2001 GBD study, reported in more detail in chapters 3 and 4 of this volume. A concluding section takes stock of the work on disease burden since the early 1990s and suggests some key areas for further work.
571 citations
TL;DR: This work quantifies population-level effects of all higher-than-optimum concentrations of blood glucose on mortality from ischaemic heart disease and stroke worldwide and concludes that programmes for cardiovascular risk and diabetes management and control at the population level need to be more closely integrated.
379 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors quantify population-level bias in self-reported weight and height as a function of age, sex, and the mode of selfreport, and estimate unbiased trends in national and state level obesity in the USA.
Abstract: SUMMARY Objectives: To quantify population-level bias in self-reported weight and height as a function of age, sex, and the mode of selfreport, and to estimate unbiased trends in national and state level obesity in the USA. Design: Statistical analysis of repeated cross-sectional health examination surveys (the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey [NHANES]) and health surveys (the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System [BRFSS]) in the USA. Setting: The 50 states of the USA and the District of Columbia. Results: In the USA, on average, women underreported their weight, but men did not. Young and middle-aged (565 years) adult men over-reported their height more than women of the same age. In older age groups, over-reporting of height was similar in men and women. Population-level bias in self-reported weight was larger in telephone interviews (BRFSS) than in-person interviews (NHANES). Except in older adults, height was overreported more often in telephone interviews than in-person interviews. Using corrected weight and height in the year 2000, Mississippi (31%) and Texas (30%) had the highest prevalence of obesity for men; Texas (37%), Louisiana (37%), Mississippi (37%), District of Columbia (37%), Alabama (37%), and South Carolina (36%) for women. Conclusions: Population-level bias in self-reported weight and height is larger in telephone interviews than in-person interviews. Telephone interviews are a low-cost method for regular, nationally- and sub-nationally representative monitoring of obesity. It is possible to obtain corrected estimates of trends and geographical distributions of obesity from telephone interviews by using systematic analysis which measure weight and height from an independent sample of the same population.
360 citations
TL;DR: Estimating DALYs specifically for the United States provides a comprehensive assessment of health problems for this country compared to what is available using mortality data alone.
Abstract: Burden of disease studies have been implemented in many countries using the Disability-Adjusted Life Year (DALY) to assess major health problems. Important objectives of the study were to quantify intra-country differentials in health outcomes and to place the United States situation in the international context. We applied methods developed for the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) to data specific to the United States to compute Disability-Adjusted Life Years. Estimates are provided by age and gender for the general population of the United States and for each of the four official race groups: White; Black; American Indian or Alaskan Native; and Asian or Pacific Islander. Several adjustments of GBD methods were made: the inclusion of race; a revised list of causes; and a revised algorithm to allocate cardiovascular disease garbage codes to ischaemic heart disease. We compared the results of this analysis to international estimates published by the World Health Organization for developed and developing regions of the world. In the mid-1990s the leading sources of premature death and disability in the United States, as measured by DALYs, were: cardiovascular conditions, breast and lung cancers, depression, osteoarthritis, diabetes mellitus, and alcohol use and abuse. In addition, motor vehicle-related injuries and the HIV epidemic exacted a substantial toll on the health status of the US population, particularly among racial minorities. The major sources of death and disability in these latter populations were more similar to patterns of burden in developing rather than developed countries. Estimating DALYs specifically for the United States provides a comprehensive assessment of health problems for this country compared to what is available using mortality data alone.
219 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors evaluated the effect of Seguro Popular on different dimensions of the health system and found that affiliation is preferentially reaching the poor and the marginalised communities.
192 citations
TL;DR: Monitoring of the delivery of 14 interventions in Mexico for 2005-06 found effective coverage for maternal and child health interventions is substantially higher than that for interventions that target other health problems andconsiderable variation also exists in effective coverage at similar amounts of spending.
TL;DR: The success of ISS funding in countries with baseline DTP3 coverage of 65% or less provides evidence that a public-private partnership can work to reverse a negative trend in global health and that performance-related disbursement can work in some settings.
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01 Jan 2006
TL;DR: Reflections on the work on health systems performance assessment at the World Health Organization based on five years of work involving a large number of researchers and policy analysts at WHO and in academic institutions around the world.
Abstract: Annual lecture by Christopher Murray, who speaks in the UK about the work on health systems performance assessment (HSPA) at the World Health Organization. He gives some reflections on this work and traces some implications for the UK. These reflections are based on five years of work involving a large number of researchers and policy analysts at WHO and in academic institutions around the world. Six topics are covered - 1. The political economy of WHO's work on health systems performance assessment. 2. The conceptual framework for health systems performance assessment including its evolution after The World Health Report 2000. 3. Systematic attempts to fill key information gaps with new data collection efforts. 4. Some of the remaining methodological challenges and some small steps in the direction of new methods that may help in the task ahead. 5. New empirical findings obtained over the last few years. 6. Final reflections.
TL;DR: High rate of grant implementation seen in countries with low income and low health-spending lends support to proponents of major increases in health assistance for the poorest countries and argues that focusing resources on low-income nations, particularly those with political stability, will not create difficulties of absorptive capacity.
TL;DR: Greater presence of medical knowledge at the time of death, reflected by place of death and cardiologists per capita, reduces the use of the ill-defined cardiovascular clusters.
Abstract: Background— Coronary heart disease (CHD) represents the largest share of cardiovascular disease in the United States, but there are conspicuous discrepancies between CHD and total cardiovascular death rates across the states, possibly due in part to variations in physician assignment of causes of death. Our aim was to identify exogenous individual- and community-level predictors of cause-of-death assignment and variability and to use these predictors to improve the comparability of CHD mortality estimates across states. Methods and Results— We performed a multinomial logistic regression analysis to estimate the effect of individual- and community-level factors on the likelihood of a death being certified as 1 of 3 ill-defined clusters (general atherosclerosis and unspecified heart disease, heart failure, and cardiac arrest) relative to being certified as CHD. The individual-level variables were the decedent’s race, sex, age, education, and place of death; the community-level variable was the number of car...
Journal Article•
TL;DR: Gori raises two generic methodological issues that are empirically irrelevant in the specific analysis in the paper but are nonetheless relevant in the general analysis.
Abstract: Gori raises two generic methodological issues that are empirically irrelevant in the specific analysis in our paper:
Posted Content•
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors use the extended median-unbiased estimation method in panel context for each sector separately and calculate both point estimates and confidence intervals, and conclude that controlling for sectoral heterogeneity bias and small sample bias will not solve the PPP puzzle.
Abstract: Recent studies about estimating half-lives of purchasing power parity argues that heterogeneity bias resulting from aggregating the real exchange rate across sectors is important and should be taken into account. However, they do not use appropriate techniques to measure persistence. In this paper we use the extended median-unbiased estimation method in panel context for each sector separately and calculate both point estimates and confidence intervals. We conclude that controlling for sectoral heterogeneity bias and small sample bias will not solve the PPP puzzle.