Publications by authors named "Janet L Leasher"

Background: While there is a long history of measuring death and disability from injuries, modern research methods must account for the wide spectrum of disability that can occur in an injury, and must provide estimates with sufficient demographic, geographical and temporal detail to be useful for policy makers. The Global Burden of Disease (GBD) 2017 study used methods to provide highly detailed estimates of global injury burden that meet these criteria.

Methods: In this study, we report and discuss the methods used in GBD 2017 for injury morbidity and mortality burden estimation.

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Article Synopsis
  • Injuries significantly impact global health, with the number of injury deaths rising from approximately 4.26 million in 1990 to about 4.48 million in 2017, despite a decline in age-standardized mortality rates.
  • The Global Burden of Disease study measured both fatal and non-fatal injuries through years of life lost (YLLs) and years lived with disability (YLDs), which were combined into disability-adjusted life years (DALYs).
  • While overall injury incidence increased, age-standardized DALYs decreased, indicating a need for ongoing research focused on injury prevention, better data collection, and improving access to medical care in high-burden areas.
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Article Synopsis
  • - The study investigates how sociodemographic factors relate to injury-related health outcomes worldwide, specifically analyzing disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) from injuries across 195 countries from 1990 to 2017.
  • - Findings show that while most injury causes display a trend of decreasing DALY rates with higher Socio-demographic Index (SDI), certain injuries like road injuries, interpersonal violence, and self-harm deviate from this trend, indicating complex underlying factors.
  • - The research highlights the importance of understanding these injury patterns to improve health strategies and intervention efforts at both national and global levels, especially since not all injuries follow the same developmental trajectory.
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Objective: To assess the impact of efforts to reduce visual impairment by detecting and treating refractive errors (REs) among schoolchildren in two urban areas of Chile.

Methods: In 2013, in the communities of Concepción and La Florida, we conducted a multicenter, multistage-sampling, cross-sectional study employing methods used by the Refractive Error Study in Children (RESC) survey. Best-corrected visual acuity was assessed using pinhole, with and without glasses.

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Objective: To estimate the prevalence and causes of blindness and vision impairment for distance and near in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) in 2015 and to forecast trends to 2020.

Methods: A meta-analysis from a global systematic review of 283 cross-sectional, population-representative studies from published and unpublished sources from 1980 to 2014 in the Global Vision Database included 17 published and 6 unpublished studies from LAC.

Results: In 2015, across LAC, age-standardised prevalence was 0.

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Objective: To estimate global and regional trends from 1990 to 2010 of the prevalence and number of persons visually impaired specifically by diabetic retinopathy (DR), as a complication of the precipitous trends in global diabetes, is fundamental for health planning purposes.

Research Design And Methods: The meta-analysis of published population studies from 1990 to 2012 for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010 (GBD) yielded estimated global regional trends in DR among other causes of moderate and severe vision impairment (MSVI; presenting visual acuity <6/18, ≥3/60) and blindness (presenting visual acuity <3/60).

Results: Globally in 2010, out of overall 32.

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Importance: The literature focuses on mortality among children younger than 5 years. Comparable information on nonfatal health outcomes among these children and the fatal and nonfatal burden of diseases and injuries among older children and adolescents is scarce.

Objective: To determine levels and trends in the fatal and nonfatal burden of diseases and injuries among younger children (aged <5 years), older children (aged 5-9 years), and adolescents (aged 10-19 years) between 1990 and 2013 in 188 countries from the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) 2013 study.

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Background: The Global Burden of Disease, Injuries, and Risk Factor study 2013 (GBD 2013) is the first of a series of annual updates of the GBD. Risk factor quantification, particularly of modifiable risk factors, can help to identify emerging threats to population health and opportunities for prevention. The GBD 2013 provides a timely opportunity to update the comparative risk assessment with new data for exposure, relative risks, and evidence on the appropriate counterfactual risk distribution.

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Background: The Global Burden of Disease Study 2013 (GBD 2013) aims to bring together all available epidemiological data using a coherent measurement framework, standardised estimation methods, and transparent data sources to enable comparisons of health loss over time and across causes, age-sex groups, and countries. The GBD can be used to generate summary measures such as disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) and healthy life expectancy (HALE) that make possible comparative assessments of broad epidemiological patterns across countries and time. These summary measures can also be used to quantify the component of variation in epidemiology that is related to sociodemographic development.

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The Global Burden of Cancer 2013.

JAMA Oncol

July 2015

Importance: Cancer is among the leading causes of death worldwide. Current estimates of cancer burden in individual countries and regions are necessary to inform local cancer control strategies.

Objective: To estimate mortality, incidence, years lived with disability (YLDs), years of life lost (YLLs), and disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) for 28 cancers in 188 countries by sex from 1990 to 2013.

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Objective: To examine the prevalence of blindness, visual impairment, and related eye diseases and conditions among adults in El Salvador, and to explore socioeconomic inequalities in their prevalence by education level and occupational status, stratified by sex.

Methods: Based upon the Rapid Assessment of Avoidable Blindness (RAAB) methodology, this nationwide sample comprised 3 800 participants (3 399 examined) ≥ 50 years old from 76 randomly selected clusters of 50 persons each. The prevalence of blindness, visual impairment and related eye diseases and conditions, including uncorrected refractive error (URE), was calculated for categories of education level and occupational status.

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Aim: To estimate the magnitude, temporal trends and subregional variation in the prevalence of blindness, and moderate/severe vision impairment (MSVI) in sub-Saharan Africa.

Methods: A systematic review was conducted of published and unpublished population-based surveys as part of the Global Burden of Disease, Risk Factors and Injuries Study 2010. The prevalence of blindness and vision impairment by country and subregion was estimated.

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Objective: To present regional estimates of the magnitude and temporal trends in the prevalence and causes of blindness and moderate/severe visual impairment (MSVI) in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC).

Methods: A systematic review of cross-sectional population-representative data from published literature and unpublished studies was accessed and extracted to model the estimated prevalence of vision loss by region, country and globally, and the attributable cause fraction by region.

Results: In the LAC combined region, estimated all-age both-gender age-standardised prevalence of blindness halved from 0.

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Importance: Understanding the major health problems in the United States and how they are changing over time is critical for informing national health policy.

Objectives: To measure the burden of diseases, injuries, and leading risk factors in the United States from 1990 to 2010 and to compare these measurements with those of the 34 countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries.

Design: We used the systematic analysis of descriptive epidemiology of 291 diseases and injuries, 1160 sequelae of these diseases and injuries, and 67 risk factors or clusters of risk factors from 1990 to 2010 for 187 countries developed for the Global Burden of Disease 2010 Study to describe the health status of the United States and to compare US health outcomes with those of 34 OECD countries.

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Background: Quantification of the disease burden caused by different risks informs prevention by providing an account of health loss different to that provided by a disease-by-disease analysis. No complete revision of global disease burden caused by risk factors has been done since a comparative risk assessment in 2000, and no previous analysis has assessed changes in burden attributable to risk factors over time.

Methods: We estimated deaths and disability-adjusted life years (DALYs; sum of years lived with disability [YLD] and years of life lost [YLL]) attributable to the independent effects of 67 risk factors and clusters of risk factors for 21 regions in 1990 and 2010.

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Background: Measuring disease and injury burden in populations requires a composite metric that captures both premature mortality and the prevalence and severity of ill-health. The 1990 Global Burden of Disease study proposed disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) to measure disease burden. No comprehensive update of disease burden worldwide incorporating a systematic reassessment of disease and injury-specific epidemiology has been done since the 1990 study.

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Background: Non-fatal health outcomes from diseases and injuries are a crucial consideration in the promotion and monitoring of individual and population health. The Global Burden of Disease (GBD) studies done in 1990 and 2000 have been the only studies to quantify non-fatal health outcomes across an exhaustive set of disorders at the global and regional level. Neither effort quantified uncertainty in prevalence or years lived with disability (YLDs).

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Background: Measurement of the global burden of disease with disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) requires disability weights that quantify health losses for all non-fatal consequences of disease and injury. There has been extensive debate about a range of conceptual and methodological issues concerning the definition and measurement of these weights. Our primary objective was a comprehensive re-estimation of disability weights for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010 through a large-scale empirical investigation in which judgments about health losses associated with many causes of disease and injury were elicited from the general public in diverse communities through a new, standardised approach.

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