Comparative quantification of health risks: Conceptual framework and methodological issues

By Christopher J. L. Murray, M. Ezzati, Alan D. Lopez, A. Rodgers, S. Vander Hoorn. Population Health Metrics, 2003

845 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Reliable and comparable analysis of risks to health is key for preventing disease and injury. Causal attribution of morbidity and mortality to risk factors has traditionally been conducted in the context of methodological traditions of individual risk factors, often in a limited number of settings, restricting comparability.In this paper, we discuss the conceptual and methodological issues for quantifying the population health effects of individual or groups of risk factors in various levels of causality using knowledge from different scientific disciplines. The issues include: comparing the burden of disease due to the observed exposure distribution in a population with the burden from a hypothetical distribution or series of distributions, rather than a single reference level such as non-exposed; considering the multiple stages in the causal network of interactions among risk factor(s) and disease outcome to allow making inferences about some combinations of risk factors for which epidemiological studies have not been conducted, including the joint effects of multiple risk factors; calculating the health loss due to risk factor(s) as a time-indexed "stream" of disease burden due to a time-indexed "stream" of exposure, including consideration of discounting; and the sources of uncertainty.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1603749d90970f601036fbcd9f13b5b2fc6d5bda

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Citations in the corpus

Global burden of 87 risk factors in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019 (2020, methodology): “The GBD 2019 estimation of attributable burden fol lowed the general framework established for comparative risk assessment (CRA) 14,15 used in GBD since 2002.”
The Age-Specific Quantitative Effects of Metabolic Risk Factors on Cardiovascular Diseases and Diabetes: A Pooled Analysis (2013, background): “The theoretical minimum-risk exposure distribution (TMRED) is an alternative exposure distribution that aims to measure the effects of all non-optimal levels of exposure in a comparable way across risk factors [2,3,35,36].”
Better air for better health: Forging synergies in policies for energy access, climate change and air pollution (2013, methodology): “The population attributable fraction to exposure is calculated based on (Murray et al., 2003) and is estimated as:”
Association Between Dietary Factors and Mortality From Heart Disease, Stroke, and Type 2 Diabetes in the United States (2017, methodology): “To determine the extent to which the estimated multivariable-adjusted effect sizes might be biased because of these limitations, 3 separate validity analyses were performed comparing the estimated effect sizes for individual dietary components to (1) observed associations of overall dietary patterns”
Global statistics on alcohol, tobacco and illicit drug use: 2017 status report (2018, background): “degree) linked to a health outcome before any such injury or disease is quantified within attributable burden (32).”