Introduction Currently, the disease burden of chronic cadmium poisoning remains unquantifiable due to the absence of disability weights (DWs). This study aimed to derive DWs for mild and severe chronic cadmium poisoning. Methods Adopting the pairwise comparison (PC) method from the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study, health state descriptions for mild and severe chronic cadmium poisoning were developed, and a severity spectrum of 13 health states was constructed based on GBD 2023. Questionnaires collecting demographic information and PC task questionnaires were distributed to the general population (n=552) and medical professionals (n=488). Results Heatmaps confirmed response consistency. Probit regression and Loess modeling revealed that DWs for mild and severe chronic cadmium poisoning were 0.099 and 0.363, respectively, in the general population, and 0.102 and 0.397, respectively, among medical professionals. Spearman correlation coefficients comparing DWs values with reference studies (GBD 2023 study and a Chinese national study) ranged from 0.64 to 0.95. Conclusion To our knowledge, this is the first study to successfully establish DW parameters for chronic cadmium poisoning. No significant differences were observed between DWs derived from the general population and those derived from medical professionals. This study provides a methodological reference for establishing DWs of environmental pollutants to assess their indirect disease burden.
He et al. (Thu,) studied this question.