Publications by authors named "Tim R Driscoll"

Objectives: To assess the population health impact of high temperatures on workplace health and safety by estimating the burden of heat-attributable occupational injury in Australia.

Study Design, Setting: Retrospective observational study; estimation of burden of occupational injury in Australia attributable to high temperatures during 2014-19, based on Safe Work Australia (work-related traumatic injury fatalities and workers' compensation databases) and Australian Institute of Health and Welfare data (Australian Burden of Disease Study and National Hospital Morbidity databases), and a meta-analysis of climate zone-specific risk data.

Main Outcome Measure: Burden of heat-attributable occupational injuries as disability-adjusted life years (DALYs), comprising the numbers of years of life lived with disability (YLDs) and years of life lost (YLLs), nationally, by Köppen-Geiger climate zone, and by state and territory.

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Objectives: Malignant mesothelioma is an uncommon cancer associated with asbestos exposure, predominantly occupational. Asbestos has been banned in Australia since 2003 but mesothelioma has a long latency and incident cases continue to present. The Australian Mesothelioma Registry was incepted to collect systematic data about incidence and mortality alongside asbestos exposure.

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Presumptive condition lists formally accept connections between military factors and veteran health conditions. An environmental scan of such lists and their evidentiary basis was conducted across four veterans' administrations to inform other administrations considering the development of such lists. Information on included conditions, qualifying military factors, and scientific processes was obtained through targeted internet searches and correspondence with veterans' administrations.

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Objectives: To determine the impact of major legislative changes to New Zealand's Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) legislation with the adoption of the Robens model as a means to control occupational risks on the burden and risk of work-related fatal injury (WRFI).

Methods: Population-based comparison of WRFI to workers aged 15-84 years occurring during three periods: before (pre:1985-1992), after legislative reform (post-1:1993-2002) and after subsequent amendment (post-2:2003-2014). Annual age-industry standardised rates were calculated with 95% CI.

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Article Synopsis
  • The GBD 2019 study systematically estimated the global cancer burden, providing data on incidence, mortality, and disability to help address cancer worldwide.
  • In 2019, an estimated 23.6 million new cancer cases and 10 million cancer deaths occurred globally, marking significant increases in rates since 2010, with cancer becoming a leading cause of both death and disability-adjusted life years (DALYs).
  • The impact of cancer varied across sociodemographic index (SDI) quintiles, with higher SDI areas seeing more new cases, while middle SDI areas experienced more deaths and DALYs, highlighting disparities in cancer burden.
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Introduction: Analyses of secular trends in work-related fatal injury in New Zealand have previously only considered the total working population, potentially hiding trends for important subgroups of workers. This paper examines trends in work-related fatalities in worker subgroups between 2005 and 2014 to indicate where workplace safety action should be prioritised.

Methods: A dataset of fatally injured workers was created; all persons aged 15-84 years, fatally injured in the period 2005-2014, were identified from mortality records, linked to coronial records which were then reviewed for work relatedness.

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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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Background: Drowning is a leading cause of injury-related mortality globally. Unintentional drowning (International Classification of Diseases (ICD) 10 codes W65-74 and ICD9 E910) is one of the 30 mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive causes of injury-related mortality in the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study. This study's objective is to describe unintentional drowning using GBD estimates from 1990 to 2017.

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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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Background: Limited information is available on exposure to high molecular weight (HMW) asthmagens derived from plants and on the main occupations and tasks that result in such exposure among workers.

Methods: Data were collected as part of the Australian Work Exposures Study-Asthma. We estimated adjusted prevalence ratios (aPR) using modified Poisson regression models to determine which factors were associated with exposure.

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Importance: Understanding global variation in firearm mortality rates could guide prevention policies and interventions.

Objective: To estimate mortality due to firearm injury deaths from 1990 to 2016 in 195 countries and territories.

Design, Setting, And Participants: This study used deidentified aggregated data including 13 812 location-years of vital registration data to generate estimates of levels and rates of death by age-sex-year-location.

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Importance: The increasing burden due to cancer and other noncommunicable diseases poses a threat to human development, which has resulted in global political commitments reflected in the Sustainable Development Goals as well as the World Health Organization (WHO) Global Action Plan on Non-Communicable Diseases. To determine if these commitments have resulted in improved cancer control, quantitative assessments of the cancer burden are required.

Objective: To assess the burden for 29 cancer groups over time to provide a framework for policy discussion, resource allocation, and research focus.

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Objective: Several animal, fish and/or shellfish derived substances encountered in the workplace can initiate or exacerbate asthma. The aims of this study were: to produce a population-based estimate of the current prevalence of occupational exposure to animal, fish and/or shellfish derived asthmagens, to identify the main circumstances of exposures and to identify occupations with the highest proportions of exposed respondents.

Methods: We used data from the Australian Work Exposure Study-Asthma, a national telephone survey that investigated the current prevalence of occupational exposure to asthmagens among Australian workers.

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Background: Shift work is often associated with sleepiness and sleep disorders. Person-directed, non-pharmacological interventions may positively influence the impact of shift work on sleep, thereby improving workers' well-being, safety, and health.

Objectives: To assess the effects of person-directed, non-pharmacological interventions for reducing sleepiness at work and improving the length and quality of sleep between shifts for shift workers.

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Background: Estimates of the burden of disease caused by a particular agent are used to assist in making policy and prioritizing actions. Most estimations have employed the attributable fraction approach, which estimates the proportion of disease cases or deaths in a specific year which are attributable to past exposure to a particular agent. While this approach has proven extremely useful in quantifying health effects, it requires historical data on exposures which are not always available.

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Background: The Global Burden of Diseases (GBD), Injuries, and Risk Factors study used the disability-adjusted life year (DALY) to quantify the burden of diseases, injuries, and risk factors. This paper provides an overview of injury estimates from the 2013 update of GBD, with detailed information on incidence, mortality, DALYs and rates of change from 1990 to 2013 for 26 causes of injury, globally, by region and by country.

Methods: Injury mortality was estimated using the extensive GBD mortality database, corrections for ill-defined cause of death and the cause of death ensemble modelling tool.

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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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Background: Shift work results in sleep-wake disturbances, which cause sleepiness during night shifts and reduce sleep length and quality in daytime sleep after the night shift. In its serious form it is also called shift work sleep disorder. Various pharmacological products are used to ameliorate symptoms of sleepiness or poor sleep length and quality.

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The Sound Practice Project is a 5-year study involving baseline evaluation, development, and implementation of musician-specific work health and safety initiatives. A cross-sectional population physical and psychological survey and physical assessment were conducted at the same time, with an auditory health assessment conducted later. The results were used to guide the development of a series of targeted interventions, encompassing physical, psychological, and auditory health components.

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Background: Shift work results in sleep-wake disturbances, which cause sleepiness during night shifts and reduce sleep length and quality in daytime sleep after the night shift. In its serious form it is also called shift work sleep disorder. Various pharmacological products are used to ameliorate symptoms of sleepiness or poor sleep length and quality.

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Background: The Millennium Declaration in 2000 brought special global attention to HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria through the formulation of Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 6. The Global Burden of Disease 2013 study provides a consistent and comprehensive approach to disease estimation for between 1990 and 2013, and an opportunity to assess whether accelerated progress has occured since the Millennium Declaration.

Methods: To estimate incidence and mortality for HIV, we used the UNAIDS Spectrum model appropriately modified based on a systematic review of available studies of mortality with and without antiretroviral therapy (ART).

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Background: The fifth Millennium Development Goal (MDG 5) established the goal of a 75% reduction in the maternal mortality ratio (MMR; number of maternal deaths per 100,000 livebirths) between 1990 and 2015. We aimed to measure levels and track trends in maternal mortality, the key causes contributing to maternal death, and timing of maternal death with respect to delivery.

Methods: We used robust statistical methods including the Cause of Death Ensemble model (CODEm) to analyse a database of data for 7065 site-years and estimate the number of maternal deaths from all causes in 188 countries between 1990 and 2013.

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