A Software Tool for Estimation of Burden of Infectious Diseases in Europe Using Incidence-Based Disability Adjusted Life Years
January
A Software Tool for Estimation of Burden of Infectious Diseases in Europe Using Incidence-Based Disability Adjusted Life Years
Edoardo Colzani 0 1
Alessandro Cassini 0 1
Daniel Lewandowski 1
Marie-Josee J. Mangen 1
Dietrich Plass 1
Scott A. McDonald 1
Alies van Lier 1
Juanita A. Haagsma 1 2
Guido Maringhini 0 1
Alessandro Pini 0 1
Piotr Kramarz 0 1
Mirjam E. Kretzschmar 1
0 European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) , Solna , Sweden , 2 Julius Centre for Health Sciences and Primary Care, University Medical Centre Utrecht , Utrecht , The Netherlands , 3 NextPage Software Daniel Lewandowski, Zielona Gora, Poland, 4 Centre for Infectious Disease Control, National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM), Bilthoven, the Netherlands, 5 Section Exposure Assessment and Environmental Health Indicators, German Environment Agency , Berlin , Germany
1 Editor: Donald R. Olson, New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene , UNITED STATES
2 Department of Global Health, Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, United States of America, 7 Department of Public Health, Erasmus Medical Center, Erasmus University Rotterdam , Rotterdam , the Netherlands
The burden of disease framework facilitates the assessment of the health impact of diseases through the use of summary measures of population health such as DisabilityAdjusted Life Years (DALYs). However, calculating, interpreting and communicating the results of studies using this methodology poses a challenge. The aim of the Burden of Communicable Disease in Europe (BCoDE) project is to summarize the impact of communicable disease in the European Union and European Economic Area Member States (EU/EEA MS). To meet this goal, a user-friendly software tool (BCoDE toolkit), was developed. This stand-alone application, written in C++, is open-access and freely available for download from the website of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC). With the BCoDE toolkit, one can calculate DALYs by simply entering the age group- and sexspecific number of cases for one or more of selected sets of 32 communicable diseases (CDs) and 6 healthcare associated infections (HAIs). Disease progression models (i.e., outcome trees) for these communicable diseases were created following a thorough literature
-
Funding: The European Centre for Disease
Prevention and Control (ECDC), a publicly funded
technical agency of the European Commission,
funded the development of the BCoDE toolkit
review of their disease progression pathway. The BCoDE toolkit runs Monte Carlo
simulations of the input parameters and provides disease-specific results, including 95%
uncertainty intervals, and permits comparisons between the different disease models entered.
Results can be displayed as mean and median overall DALYs, DALYs per 100,000
population, and DALYs related to mortality vs. disability. Visualization options summarize complex
epidemiological data, with the goal of improving communication and knowledge transfer for
decision-making.
software through the framework contract ECDC/
2013/020 "Maintenance and further development
of the BCoDE software tool" with NextPage
Software Daniel Lewandowski. DL, self-employed
at NextPage Software Daniel Lewandowski,
developed the BCoDE toolkit software but did not
have additional roles in the study design, data
collection and analysis and decision to publish. He
contributed to the preparation of the manuscript
concerning the BCoDE toolkit software
development technical description. The funder
(ECDC) also provided support in the form of
salaries for authors EC, AC and PK, but did not
have any additional role in the study design, data
collection and analysis, decision to publish, or
preparation of the manuscript. The specific roles of
these authors are articulated in the `author
contributions' section.
Competing Interests: AC, EC and PK are employed
by ECDC which funded the development of the
BCoDE toolkit software. GM and AP were
consultants with ECDC at the time of the design
and development of the project. DL, self-employed
by NextPage Software Daniel Lewandowski, is
recipient of the project funding. This does not alter
our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing
data and materials. No conflict of interest for
MJJM, DP, SAM, AvL, JAH, MEK.
Introduction
Summary measures of population health (SMPH) are composite indicators that facilitate
comprehensive and comparable quantitative assessments of health-related phenomena. Several
measures have been developed for this purpose based on different assumptions, models and
parameters [1±4]. One of the most common and prominent SMPH is the disability-adjusted
life years (DALY), which has been largely used for global comparisons of the overall impact of
diseases, injuries and risk factors [
5, 6
]. DALY is a composite metric quantifying the health
losses measured in years by adding the number of years of (...truncated)