Talk:Disability-adjusted life year

Graphic
Can someone with graphic skills change that image? Especially the "early death" person, to a skeletal person maybe - the image that's there is made of Christian afterlife euphemisms. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.190.126.223 (talk) 06:16, 8 February 2013 (UTC)
 * I came to this talk page to say virtually the identical thing, so I guess I second that. HuntClubJoe (talk) 18:04, 16 November 2014 (UTC)

Agreed, that was also my first feeling but I guess no one had the time to do so :/ Slb 10:11, 31 August 2015 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Slb (talk • contribs)
 * Put me down as another who came here to say the halo has no place in a science related article. 72.208.150.248 (talk) 23:25, 24 May 2016 (UTC)
 * Agreed, I've substituted a representation of a coffin. Please improve the graphic if you can. Chris55 (talk) 19:29, 27 July 2016 (UTC)

Clarification
Clarification of the base rates would be good. The Australian figures given as examples are simply " / 1000 ". Does this mean per 1000 inhabitants, or per 1000 years of life? I assume it's the former, but it's not stated in the article. I note also that the diagram on the right gives DALYs per 100,000 inhabitants on a world map. It's a bit confusing that a different base rate is given here (100,000 versus 1000).

And the world map gives the curious impression that the maximum DALY is 80,000 plus. This is curious because it's quite close to 100,000. What's the maximum possible DALY figure for an incredibly unhealthy population? It's not 100,000 / 100,000, is it? That would just mean 1 year of healthy life lost per inhabitant. But then again, that looks pretty modest. Or would 100,000 / 100,000 instead mean everybody dies very young or spends their whole life disabled?

Clarification of what the Japanese reference rates are would also be helpful. I'm guessing that if the life expectancy of a Japanese person is, say, 80 years, then that means the maximum possible DALY is 80 * 100,000 = 8,000,000 per 100,000 population. But then again, that makes the highest rates on the world map diagram look very low. Hopefully my confusion is illustrative of the problem with the article!

86.176.59.177 (talk) 13:41, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

Adding to this: it's unclear here whether DALY uses the same partial-year adjustments as, say QALY, where a disabled year is valued differently than death. The simple arithmetic formula here seems to imply that everything's just integers of what's bad. That seems like an inexact metric at best, and if it's not that, then it should probably have some clarification.174.14.176.137 (talk) 03:18, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

When DALY prefered to QALY
QALYs seem to measure a similar concept and have been used since 1956. Can anyone say why DALY introduced and how/when it is better than QALY ? - Rod57 (talk) 23:26, 20 August 2011 (UTC)
 * The basic difference is that QALYs only measure the cost of medical intervetions. Thus it's possible that death has a zero QALY if no medical intervention is involved. DALYs on the other hand include the cost of premature deaths in the overall health burden. Chris55 (talk) 12:01, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

5 of the 10 leading causes of disability were psychiatric conditions
This paragraph in the lede has been challenged for a citation since Sep 2014. I don't have access to the original 1997 paper by Murray et al. but looking at the 2013 paper it's very questionable indeed. It's possibly referring only to the YLD component but it is certainly not the case that any mental illness appears in the top 10 of the DALY list in either 1990 or 2010. (Even in the USA there is only 1 such entry in the top 10.) I am therefore removing the whole paragraph. Chris55 (talk) 18:15, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

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YLD
Is YLD = Years Lived With Disability (as YLD Meaning 2 states) DALY, Years Lived With Disability. or Years Lost Due to Disability (as this article itself states)? The 'years lost due to disability (YLD)' component measures the burden of living with a disease or disability. Isn't that quite different - or is it? MaynardClark (talk) 16:01, 9 November 2017 (UTC)

Criticism section
Only the first sentence of the criticism paragraph is criticism while the rest of it denies reason for criticism. Can someone correct the apparent bias? There's a much more robust treatment of the issues in the "debate" section of the wikipedia article about QALY.
 * Well, modify what now is there. MaynardClark (talk) 19:20, 31 August 2018 (UTC)
 * Yes, modify and get rollbacked for one of million of excuses. WP only trusts its few masters in cii'a. PS: its obvious that DALY is a biased junk. The most illnesses are directly connected to stress (social/physical) and poisoning (soil(food),air (chemical/magnetic)). Even with greatest medicine, but heavy stress/poisoning - you get a longer life as a brain-dead zombie on meds.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.1.190.40 (talk) 12:37, 30 December 2023 (UTC)

Age weighting
On 2021-05-30 the section on Age weighting began, 'A crucial distinction among DALY studies has been the use of "age-weighting", in which the value of each year of life depends on age; however, the World Health Organization has abandoned age weighting and time discounting in DALYs since 2010.'

Why is this distinction "crucial"? In what sense is this "crucial"?

The, section 2.1, p. 5, say they "held a consultation in July 2011 with 21 philosophers, ethicists, and economists to advise on the value choices that should be incorporated into the DALY summary measure used for the GBD 2010" and decided to simplify the process by not discounting for time nor using unequal age weights. I didn't find where they justified that decision. However, I suspect that it was difficult to get a consensus on age weighting. Also, comparisons of DALYs using alternative weights on pp. 6-9 suggested that the differences in age weighting were relatively small. Meanwhile, discounting at 3 percent essentially mean that anything that happened to people age 85 and older got negligible weight in the computations, and many felt it was not easy to justify that ethically.

I'm simplifying that sentence to just, "The World Health Organization (WHO) used age weighting and time discounting at 3 percent in DALYs prior to 2010 but discontinued using them starting in 2010." I hope you will find this an improvement -- or at least not problematic. DavidMCEddy (talk) 12:46, 30 May 2021 (UTC)

Letters confusion
why daly is not calped daily by abbreviation? Despite that the acronym daily make it more cool sounding because it has yes to do with per day and more. 2404:8000:1027:85F6:3C40:9EC3:4993:877C (talk) 06:29, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

No explanation for the term HALY when it first appears
The term HALY is used without a hyperlink or explanation prior or immediately following its use 2600:100A:B049:625B:905E:898F:35E1:732A (talk) 03:48, 23 September 2023 (UTC)