Reevaluating health metrics: Unraveling the limitations of disability-adjusted life years as an indicator in disease burden assessment (original) (raw)

Opinion Review

World J Methodol. Mar 20, 2025; 15(1): 95796
Published online Mar 20, 2025. doi: 10.5662/wjm.v15.i1.95796

Reevaluating health metrics: Unraveling the limitations of disability-adjusted life years as an indicator in disease burden assessment

Ariel Beresniak, Gerard Duru, Data Mining International, Geneva 1216, Switzerland

Dominique Bremond-Gignac, Department of Ophtalmology, Necker-Enfants Malades University Hospital, AP-HP, Paris-Cité University, INSERM, UMRS1138, Team 17, From Physio

pathology of Ocular Diseases to Clinical Development, Sorbonne Paris Cité University, Centre de Recherche des Cordeliers, Paris 75015, France

Danielle Dupont, Data Mining America, Montreal H2Y, Canada

Author contributions: Beresniak A and Duru G conceived the methodological analyses; Duru G developed the theoretical framework; Bremond-Gignac D and Dupont D aided in the analysis and the interpretation; Beresniak A supervised the project and took the lead in writing the manuscript; All authors discussed the results and contributed to the final manuscript.

Conflict-of-interest statement: All authors have no conflicts of interest to disclose.

Open-Access: This article is an open-access article that was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: https://creativecommons.org/Licenses/by-nc/4.0/

Received: April 18, 2024
Revised: September 12, 2024
Accepted: September 23, 2024
Published online: March 20, 2025
Processing time: 163 Days and 15.6 Hours

Core Tip

Core Tip: Despite its adoption for conducting burden of disease studies, the disability-adjusted life years synthetic indicator has raised substantial methodological concerns since its introduction, leading to inconsistent and non-reproducible outcomes, and consequently, flawed results and public health rankings.