Disability-Adjusted Life Years in Children and Adolescents in Europe

Abstract:

Measures of burden of disease such as the DALYs provide useful indications for identifying health priorities in a population, improving resource allocation, assessing the progress in performance over time in a region or comparing performances across regions. DALYs represent the healthy years of life lost due to mortality or to disability and therefore allow to quantify of the impact of diseases and conditions on health in a more complete way than mortality or incidence alone. This measure is particularly important in children, whose long life-expectancy makes any loss of healthy years more considerable. We present some burden of disease estimates among children and adolescents in Europe from the WHO Global Burden of Disease 2002. The estimates are also described by European subregion, because the rate and distribution of DALYs varied depending on the subregion. In addition, we present the results of the few European studies that assessed the burden of diseases specifically among children. Some of these studies regarded the burden of disease attributable to environmental factors. These studies have proved useful to raise awareness of issues, such as the impact of certain environmental risks, to highlight health gaps across the region, and to estimate the effect of prevention programs. However, more research is needed because the conditions and factors studied so far are only a small number and therefore not sufficient to provide policy makers with a clear and complete picture of the relative magnitude of all the main conditions potentially affecting children.