Healthy Algorithms

A follow-up on my recent adventure digging into the GBD 2010 risk factors, wherein I helped a fellow researcher find the specific diseases to which the risk factor DALYs are attributed (http://ihmeuw.org/2c6v ):

I helped find where to look at the risk factor attribution, but what if you want to download the numbers? The “download chart data as CSV” link gives you something, but it is not the risk factors, it is just the disease fractions of total DALYs:

Fortunately, a javascript guru with a few minute told me the incantation to get the risk factor fractions out, recorded here for posterity:

$.fileDownload(app.settings.baseURL+'php/risk_data.php',{ httpMethod: "POST", data:{ measure: app.getMeasure(1, 'percent'), sex: app.getSex(1), age: app.getAge(1), year: app.getYear(1), location: app.getLocation(1), cause: d3.keys(app.metadata.causes), risk: app.getRisk(1), format: 'csv', title: app.charts[1].getTitle(), } });

I have to make the old DisMod-III website disappear (is it still here?). It is beautiful, but it is not available, and so I have to turn away researchers who want to use it for their own work. Fortunately, I can send them to a GitHub repository of DisMod code that they can use. But recently, it was not really DisMod that the emailing researcher wanted. I think they were really interested in digging into the details behind a figure like this one:

For that, there is a non-dead website I can offer: GBD Compare. Finding your way around it can be a bit of a challenge, though, so here is a link straight to the relative contribution of each nutritional risk factor for Germany and USA: http://ihmeuw.org/2c6t ; to see from which specific diseases the risk factor DALYs are attributed, you can use a different part of this tool, linked to here: http://ihmeuw.org/2c6v