Global Burden of Disease 2010 Study: A personal reflection

Abstract

[first paragraph of article]

The Global Burden of Disease (GBD) 2010 project is a massive effort to systematically describe the epidemiology of a wide array of major diseases, injuries and risk factors. It collates millions of observations and has involved collaboration of nearly 500 scientists from 50 countries. Just to give some idea of the size of the endeavour, the analysis has included 800 million deaths. It has taken 5 years to come to the point where The Lancet was able to publish the headline results, but the database is so incredibly rich that there are likely to be hundreds of subsequent papers using this data source. One can anticipate papers on each risk factor (or groups of risk factors – such as dietary risk factors); each disease or specialty; each region; each country, and then local papers on disease outcomes within each country or region.