Global Burden of Disease Study: Oral Health
Professor Marcenes led the Oral Health Research within the new Global Burden of Disease study (the GBD Study). The new Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study commenced in the spring of 2007 and was the first major effort since the original GBD 1990 Study to carry out a complete systematic assessment of global data on all diseases and injuries. GBD 2010 has produced comprehensive and comparable estimates of the burden of diseases, injuries and risk factors for two time periods, 1990 and 2005, with projections for 2010. This project was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The GBD Study brought together a community of experts and leaders in epidemiology and other areas of public health research from around the world to measure current levels and recent trends in all major diseases, injuries, and risk factors, and to produce new and comprehensive sets of estimates and easy-to-use tools for research and teaching. This ambitious effort was conducted systematically and transparently; both its methods and results were made available to the public.
The new GBD Study was led by a consortium including the Harvard Initiative for Global health at Harvard University, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Queensland, and the World Health Organization (WHO).
The GBD Study focussed on more than 175 diseases and injuries and more than 43 risk factors for 21 regions of the world. It served to systematically incorporate the evidence on each major disease and risk factor into a coherent set of epidemiological estimates. It has also provided an opportunity for concerted work on new age- and sex-specific mortality estimates, disability weight measurement, estimates of probabilities of disabling sequelae, standardization of tools and methods for resolving inconsistencies, dealing with missing data and quantifying uncertainty. The GBD Study conducted epidemiological reviews of all diseases, injuries, and risk factors; estimated mortality and causes of death for all countries in the world; derived new disability weights for an updated list of disabling sequelae, all leading to final, consistent and comprehensive estimates of the burden of diseases, injuries and risk factors for 1990 and 2005.