Australian Burden of Disease Study: Impact and causes of illness and death in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, 2011

Burden of disease analysis is a way to compare the impact of different diseases, conditions or injuries on a population. This impact can be broadly divided into non-fatal (living with a disease) and fatal (dying from a disease) effects. These studies also attribute a proportion of the burden to risk factors. Burden of disease studies are useful for monitoring population health, informing health policy and service planning, and as an input to analysing the cost-effectiveness of interventions.

The Australian Burden of Disease Study 2011 responds to a need for updated, comparable evidence on the health of the Australian population, to inform health policy decision making, with national estimates last published in 2007 using 2003 data. This report provides estimates of the total, non-fatal and fatal burden for the Australian population for 2011 and 2003, using DALY (disability-adjusted life year) metric for 200 diseases, as well as estimates of the burden attributable to nearly 30 risk factors. One (1) disability-adjusted life year (or 1 DALY) represents 1 year of healthy life lost, either through premature death or from living with an illness or injury.