References
- C.J.L. Murray, A.D. Lopez. The Global Burden of Disease. 1996; Harvard University Press: Cambridge MA.
- World Bank. World Development Report 1993. 1993; Oxford University Press: Oxford.
- C. AbouZahr. Disability adjusted life years (DALYs) and reproductive health: a critical analysis. Reproductive Health Matters. 7(14): 1999; 118–129.
- WHO. DALYs and Reproductive Health: Report of an Informal Consultation. WHO/RHT798.28. 1998; WHO: Geneva.
- An informal consultation on ascribing disability weights to reproductive health conditions. Geneva, 17–19 January 2000.
- See. T. Arnesen, E. Nord. The value of DALY life: problems with ethics and validity of disability adjusted life years. BMJ. 319: 1999; 1423–1425. There are various formulations of the PTO-valuation questions. One is as follows: ‘Imagine that you are a decision-maker facing a difficult choice between two different programmes, with enough money to fund only one of them. The first programme would prevent the deaths of 100 perfectly healthy individuals, thereby extending their lives for 10 years each. The second programme would prevent the onset of some disabling condition in a certain number of healthy people, thereby improving their health expectancy from 10 years in a state worse than perfect health to 10 years lived in perfect health. In this task, you must weigh the benefits of extending lives in perfect health against the benefits of averting disability.’ If someone answers, for example, that 700 persons must be prevented from getting the disabling disease to compensate for the deaths of 100 healthy people, then the DALY weight would be 100/700=0.14. Other formulations of the PTO questions carry the implication that years of life of disabled persons have a lesser value than the years of life of healthy persons.
- T. Arnesen, O.F. Norheim. Time out for time trade-off?. 1999; National Institute of Public Health: Oslo. (Paper in preparation).
- R. Sadana. A closer look at the WHO Global Burden of Disease Study’s methodology to develop disability weights: how do poor women’s values in a developing country compare with international experts’ values. 1999. (Forthcoming).
- The visual analog scale uses a thermometer-type scale to indicate the value one places on each state, relative to the best imaginable health state and death, and relative to all of the other health states under consideration.
- S. Anand, K. Hanson. Disability adjusted life years: a critical review. Journal of Health Economics. 16: 1997; 685–702.
- If so-called health gap indicators such as DALLs are used, these are implicitly minimised when using CEA, but the implications are the same as when maximising a health indicator.