Given that this only involved one week of research, this is a strong starting point for more in-depth work—which, as you have indicated, will likely result in a less cost-effective estimate.
One quick comment:
DALYs are bad. They measure the burden of disease. They represent years lost to mortality, and years lost to poor health. We want to avertDALYs. In a couple of places this post talks about averting DALYs, but it mostly seems to talk as if DALYs are a good thing being lost to diabetes.
Similarly your evaluative framework states that ‘A full, healthy life is equivalent to 61.09 DALYs’. This seems to be conflating DALYs with QALYs; QALYs are good—we want more QALYs.
It’s loose talk, I agree—what’s we’re talking about really are health-adjusted life years (HALE), the loss of which are accounted for via DALYs. Probably should fix that going forward, but in general I find that people intuitively get the idea of disability-adjusted life years as a positive thing (for whatever reason)
Given that this only involved one week of research, this is a strong starting point for more in-depth work—which, as you have indicated, will likely result in a less cost-effective estimate.
One quick comment:
DALYs are bad. They measure the burden of disease. They represent years lost to mortality, and years lost to poor health. We want to avert DALYs. In a couple of places this post talks about averting DALYs, but it mostly seems to talk as if DALYs are a good thing being lost to diabetes.
Similarly your evaluative framework states that ‘A full, healthy life is equivalent to 61.09 DALYs’. This seems to be conflating DALYs with QALYs; QALYs are good—we want more QALYs.
It’s loose talk, I agree—what’s we’re talking about really are health-adjusted life years (HALE), the loss of which are accounted for via DALYs. Probably should fix that going forward, but in general I find that people intuitively get the idea of disability-adjusted life years as a positive thing (for whatever reason)