Chronic Diseases 1: The burden and costs of chronic diseases in low-income and middle-income countries

The investigators argued that people who were ill lost/2.9 billion (about $5.2 billion) in potential earnings, and they valued the time spent by informal carers at a further £2.4 billion (roughly $4.3 billion).4 Although there are now many estimates of the economic effects of different types of chronic diseases, they are not directly comparable because inconsistent methods are used and because different societies have different ways of delivering and financing health services, which directly impinge on costs.5-10 Accordingly, the overall objective of this Series is to assess more accurately the effect of chronic diseases on health and economic wellbeing with consistent methods, and to provide empirical evidence for possible strategies to reduce their harmful effects, to support low-income and middleincome countries as they respond to the chronic disease epidemics. For the other eight countries, five in Asia and three in Africa, deaths by age, sex, and cause were estimated by use of available country-specific data for levels of all-cause mortality, together with improved cause-of-death models based on a dataset of 1613 country-years of cause-of-death distributions from 58 countries between 1950 and 2001.14 Population-based epidemiological studies, disease registers, and notifications systems also contributed to the estimation of mortality due to 21 specific causes of death, including HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, vaccine-preventable diseases, and cancers.13 To quantify incidence, prevalence, and severity of disorders for calculation of the years lived with disability component of the DALY, around 8700 datasets were used, about a quarter of which (2100) were related to chronic diseases.