Category Archives: global health

August 30, 2013 · 8:35 pm

Burden of substance use and mental disorders published

Papers on with results from some of my favorite models from the GBD 2010 appeared this week:

Degenhardt et al, Global burden of disease attributable to illicit drug use and dependence: findings from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010, http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(13)61530-5

Whiteford et al, Global burden of disease attributable to mental and substance use disorders: findings from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010, http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(13)61611-6

It is just the kind of stuff to generate catchy health news headlines.

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August 27, 2013 · 8:00 am

SES reading list

I got stuck trying to find a good definition of “socioeconomic status” recently. Maybe there isn’t one. Here is a bunch of reading on the matter:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_status
http://www.apa.org/pi/ses/resources/publications/factsheet-education.aspx
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2465546
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3241948
http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev.publhealth.18.1.341
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2792081/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1447206
http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/amp/49/1/15/
http://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797(07)00314-5/fulltext
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19178922
http://www.jstor.org/stable/27522200
http://heapol.oxfordjournals.org/content/21/6/459.long

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August 20, 2013 · 8:00 am

GBD 2010 in Discover Magazine

If I’m going to call attention to magazine coverage of the GBD 2010, I must also point out the great Discover Magazine article my former classmate wrote, which includes a snapshot I’m pretty sure I took.

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August 19, 2013 · 8:00 am

GBD 2010 as described in the Atlantic

Here is a nice, concise explanation of what the GBD 2010 Study found, published last Jan in Atlantic Magazine.

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August 16, 2013 · 8:00 am

IHME data in Economist viz

I had two colleagues call my attention to a cool use of GBD 2010 estimates recently: the Economist observed World Hepatitis Day by calling attention to the deaths due to hepatitis as compared to the deaths due to HIV. It is very nice to see these numbers getting out into the world.

But there are a lot of metrics to use for this comparison, and a lot of ways to show them besides a four-colored map. Find a country of interest from their map, and then make a detailed comparison on the GBD-Compare tool: China, North Africa/Middle East, United States.

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August 14, 2013 · 8:00 am

IHD in GBD-Compare

As I mentioned, disease-specific papers I helped with from the GBD 2010 work are starting to appear, and the GBD-Compare tool tells a story about each one. This one is about heart disease, as described in Forouzanfar et al. Assessing the global burden of ischemic heart disease, part 2: analytic methods and estimates of the global epidemiology of ischemic heart disease in 2010.

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August 13, 2013 · 8:00 am

Descriptive Epi Paper Pile

A small pile of disease-specific papers I helped with from the GBD 2010 have started to make their way into the world. Each should have a set of links to an appropriately selected spot in the GBD-Compare tool:

It would be great if the systematic review data from these studies was released as well! At least two groups have actually used the HCV replication dataset in their own research now.

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July 26, 2013 · 8:00 am

What are HIV+ patients dying of?

A question that has been coming up in a lot of different forms lately is the title of this post: What are HIV+ patients dying of? In high-income settings, for people who are getting treatment, the answer seems to be known, by those in the know, and perhaps the definitive work is Causes of Death in HIV-1–Infected Patients Treated with Antiretroviral Therapy, 1996–2006: Collaborative Analysis of 13 HIV Cohort Studies.

Figure http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3157754/figure/F2/

Left unanswered is what is going on with people who are not getting treatment, who are not diagnosed, and who are not living in Europe or North America.

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July 24, 2013 · 8:00 am

Modeling global health diagnostics

I had the opportunity to attend a days worth of talks on mathematical epidemiological modeling for new diagnostic technologies recently, something that I don’t have any experience with. It is interesting to see how similar areas approach similar problems differently. Certainly in my GBD 2010 descriptive epidemiology modeling work, I needed to cope with changes in diagnostic technology, for example a test for heart attacks developed in the 1990s led to detection of 50% more cases. But I never looked at things from the perspective of the diagnostic developer (or diagnostic investor).

If I were to start, it seems like the Nature series Improved Diagnostic Technologies for the Developing World is loaded with interesting approaches and results. It is several years old now, but it was never called to my attention before. I’m going to take a look at it.

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June 28, 2013 · 6:18 pm

PBFs in the Field

It is that time of year again, when the IHME post-bachelors fellows go off for their field placements. Some are keeping nice blogs of their experience:

p.s. The comment spam was getting so bad, I had to turn it off. PBFs, email me if you would like your blog listed here, too.

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