Methodological considerations in injury burden of disease studies across Europe: a systematic literature review.

BACKGROUND: Calculating the disease burden due to injury is complex, as it requires many methodological choices. Until now, an overview of the methodological design choices that have been made in burden of disease (BoD) studies in injury populations is not available. The aim of this systematic literature review was to identify existing injury BoD studies undertaken across Europe and to comprehensively review the methodological design choices and assumption parameters that have been made to calculate years of life lost (YLL) and years lived with disability (YLD) in these studies. METHODS: We searched EMBASE, MEDLINE, Cochrane Central, Google Scholar, and Web of Science, and the grey literature supplemented by handsearching, for BoD studies. We included injury BoD studies that quantified the BoD expressed in YLL, YLD, and disability-adjusted life years (DALY) in countries within the European Region between early-1990 and mid-2021. RESULTS: We retrieved 2,914 results of which 48 performed an injury-specific BoD assessment. Single-country independent and Global Burden of Disease (GBD)-linked injury BoD studies were performed in 11 European countries. Approximately 79% of injury BoD studies reported the BoD by external cause-of-injury. Most independent studies used the incidence-based approach to calculate YLDs. About half of the injury disease burden studies applied disability weights (DWs) developed by the GBD study. Almost all independent injury studies have determined YLL using national life tables. CONCLUSIONS: Considerable methodological variation across independent injury BoD assessments was observed; differences were mainly apparent in the design choices and assumption parameters towards injury YLD calculations, implementation of DWs, and the choice of life table for YLL calculations. Development and use of guidelines for performing and reporting of injury BoD studies is crucial to enhance transparency and comparability of injury BoD estimates across Europe and beyond.

Burden of non-communicable disease studies in Europe: a systematic review of data sources and methodological choices.

BACKGROUND: Assessment of disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) resulting from non-communicable diseases (NCDs) requires specific calculation methods and input data. The aims of this study were to (i) identify existing NCD burden of disease (BoD) activities in Europe; (ii) collate information on data sources for mortality and morbidity; and (iii) provide an overview of NCD-specific methods for calculating NCD DALYs. METHODS: NCD BoD studies were systematically searched in international electronic literature databases and in grey literature. We included all BoD studies that used the DALY metric to quantify the health impact of one or more NCDs in countries belonging to the European Region. RESULTS: A total of 163 BoD studies were retained: 96 (59%) were single-country or sub-national studies and 67 (41%) considered more than one country. Of the single-country studies, 29 (30%) consisted of secondary analyses using existing Global Burden of Disease (GBD) results. Mortality data were mainly derived (49%) from vital statistics. Morbidity data were frequently (40%) drawn from routine administrative and survey datasets, including disease registries and hospital discharge databases. The majority (60%) of national BoD studies reported mortality corrections. Multimorbidity adjustments were performed in 18% of national BoD studies. CONCLUSION: The number of national NCD BoD assessments across Europe increased over time, driven by an increase in BoD studies that consisted of secondary data analysis of GBD study findings. Ambiguity in reporting the use of NCD-specific BoD methods underlines the need for reporting guidelines of BoD studies to enhance the transparency of NCD BoD estimates across Europe.

Effects of management strategies on animal welfare and productivity under heat stress: A synthesis.

Climate change includes different dramatic events, and among them, heat stress exposition is the strongest phenomenon affecting the livestock sector. The effects of heat stress events on animal welfare are complex and the economic impacts for the livestock sector are relevant. Management measures may contribute to improve the resilience to heat stress, but the extent to which they impact on livestock performances and management strategies depend on the magnitude of the stress conditions. Through a pioneering synthesis of existing knowledge from experiments conducted in controlled conditions, we show that management strategies, both adaptation and mitigation measures, halved the negative impacts on the ruminants' performances and welfare induced by heat stress, but the efficacy is low in extreme conditions, which in turn are more and more frequent. These novel findings emphasize the need to deepen research on more effective adaptation and mitigation measures.

Burden of disease attributable to risk factors in European countries: a scoping literature review.

OBJECTIVES: Within the framework of the burden of disease (BoD) approach, disease and injury burden estimates attributable to risk factors are a useful guide for policy formulation and priority setting in disease prevention. Considering the important differences in methods, and their impact on burden estimates, we conducted a scoping literature review to: (1) map the BoD assessments including risk factors performed across Europe; and (2) identify the methodological choices in comparative risk assessment (CRA) and risk assessment methods. METHODS: We searched multiple literature databases, including grey literature websites and targeted public health agencies websites. RESULTS: A total of 113 studies were included in the synthesis and further divided into independent BoD assessments (54 studies) and studies linked to the Global Burden of Disease (59 papers). Our results showed that the methods used to perform CRA varied substantially across independent European BoD studies. While there were some methodological choices that were more common than others, we did not observe patterns in terms of country, year or risk factor. Each methodological choice can affect the comparability of estimates between and within countries and/or risk factors, since they might significantly influence the quantification of the attributable burden. From our analysis we observed that the use of CRA was less common for some types of risk factors and outcomes. These included environmental and occupational risk factors, which are more likely to use bottom-up approaches for health outcomes where disease envelopes may not be available. CONCLUSIONS: Our review also highlighted misreporting, the lack of uncertainty analysis and the under-investigation of causal relationships in BoD studies. Development and use of guidelines for performing and reporting BoD studies will help understand differences, avoid misinterpretations thus improving comparability among estimates. REGISTRATION: The study protocol has been registered on PROSPERO, CRD42020177477 (available at: https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/PROSPERO/ ).