Global Burden of Disease 2025

The Global Burden of Disease study is a comparative risk assessment of burden of disease and injury attributable to a mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive set of fatal and non-fatal health outcomes. The 2021 edition covered 371 diseases and injuries in 204 countries and territories and 811 subnational locations, 1990–2021. In England, GBD metrics are available as time series since 1990, at national, regional and local authority level. The metrics produced are estimates of years lived with disability (YLDs), years of life lost (YLLs), disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs), and healthy life expectancy (HALE). Prevalence and incidence of death and morbidity are produced as by-products of the modelling exercise. Data are usually extracted from vital registration systems, verbal autopsies, censuses, household surveys, disease-specific registries, health service contact data, and other sources, including published literature. The 2021 edition utilised 2,348 data sources for the UK alone. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation have developed and refined the methodology over the past 30 years. Its human and IT resources allow IHME to produce these metrics for over 200 countries in an ongoing production cycle. It is the only organisation of this kind worldwide to have produced these public global goods for decades. Its quality assurance framework comprises a worldwide Collaborative Network of experts, an Independent Advisory Committee and a Secretariat. Production of metrics complies with the Guidelines for Accurate and Transparent Health Estimates Reporting (GATHER) recommendations. The Institute owns the Intellectual Property rights to modelling methodology, tools and data visualisation software. The technical complexity, the IT and labour-intensive nature of the work and the QA framework make IHME the only supplier of these metrics to the standard required, leaving no reasonable alternative.