Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
on behalf of Lifting The Burden: the Global Campaign against HeadacheThe capstone papers on the Global Burden of Disease study 2019 (GBD2019), delayed by a diversion of resources to mapping covid-19, appeared in Lancet on October 17th.The accompanying announcement by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) described GBD2019 as "the largest and most comprehensive effort to quantify health loss across places and over time", including "more than 3.5 billion estimates of … 369 diseases and injuries … in 204 countries and territories" 1.IHME had previously announced its move to a 3-year cycle of major model updates for most non-fatal causes and risk factors (but not causes of death) 2.Each future GBD round will include a subset of these "in rotation", while still producing results each year for all causes of death and all non-fatal outcomes.The focus among the capstone papers was therefore on disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) 3, without the usual separately reported estimates of years lived with disability (YLDs).From a policy perspective (GBD's main purpose is to inform health policy), this makes complete sense: years of healthy life lost to early mortality are clearly no less important than those lost to disability.But the approach takes away the spotlight from disabling diseases that do not cause early deathsuch as headache disorders.Nevertheless, headache disorders in 2019 ranked 14th among global causes of DALYs (all ages, both genders) 3.Seven non-communicable disorders were ranked higher: ischaemic heart disease, stroke, chronic obstructive
Steiner et al. (2020) studied this question.