Modified disability adjusted life years as a measure for burden of diseases: modification and application

Magued I Osman, Egyptian Cabinet Information and Decision Support Centre (IDSC)
Hanan Girgis, Egyptian Cabinet Information and Decision Support Centre (IDSC)

Objective: Modifying DALY to be more useful in setting health priorities, especially on the individual level. Methods: A dependency weight reflecting the dependency of the family members on the patient was included in the DALY calculations. The modified DALY was applied on two diseases using the data of the SFHS1996. Findings: DALYs and MDALYs of diabetes were less than DALYs and MDALYs of asthma respectively. Percent change in DALYs of diabetes after including the dependency weight was greater than in DALYs of asthma. Ranks of DALYs of 88.5% of diabetes patients and 10.8% of asthma patients differed from their MDALYs ranks. Conclusion: Including dependency weights changed the DALYs of most of the patients and their ranks. This asserts that the age weights were not enough to reflect the importance of the patients' role. MDALYs will be more informative in several applications especially in ranking patients in transplant surgeries waiting lists.