Dr. Elena von der Lippe, scientific researcher with Robert Koch Institute, Germany, is in the burden-eu spotlight to discuss the BURDEN2020 initiative - the German national burden of disease study.
BURDEN2020 was initiated as a pilot project with the aim of establishing a comprehensive national Burden of Disease study in Germany. It started in 2018 and intended to provide estimates of disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) for a limited number of diseases, with years of life lost to premature mortality (YLL) estimates for all diseases, and risk factors on a detailed regional level (96 spatial planning regions in Germany). In the long run, the study is foreseen to be transformed into a tool that enables continual data processing and visualization of results.
BURDEN 2020 was jointly carried out by three institutions. It was led by the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) in the Department of Epidemiology and Health Monitoring with close cooperation with the Scientific Institute of the AOK (WIdO) and the German Environment Agency (UBA). The project was additionally accompanied by a scientific advisory board that was involved in important methodological decisions. BURDEN 2020 was also embedded in the European Burden of Disease Network, and used the platform for close scientific debates and cooperation within the field of burden of disease methodological developments.
The first round of estimates and results of BURDEN2020 are available at: https://www.daly.rki.de/en
The documentation of all methodological challenges and decisions can be found here: https://edoc.rki.de/bitstream/handle/176904/10984/Porst%20et%20al._Methodenbericht_BURDEN2020_V2_engl.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
The next work step is to extend the assessments to further diseases and to update them for a longer time series (2015 – 2023), which will enable to track the development of the burden of selected diseases in the last years not only in Germany as a whole, but also on a detailed regional level. Furthermore, through incorporating the German Index of Socioeconomic Deprivation (GISD), the estimates on regional burden of diseases will be related to people’s living conditions. It will also include information on the attributed burden to certain risk factors.
Further publications from the project: https://www.daly.rki.de/en/publications
