The global burden of liver disease: a challenge for methods and for public health

BMC Medicine

Peter Byass¹ 

[1] WHO Collaborating Centre for Verbal Autopsy, Epidemiology and Global Health, Department of Public Health and Clinical Medicine, Umeå University, Umeå 90187, Sweden

关键词: Civil registration;    Risk factors;    Vaccination;    Global estimates;    Hepatitis;    Alcohol consumption;    Verbal autopsy;    Mortality;    Cirrhosis;    Liver disease;   

Others  :  1123205
DOI  :  10.1186/s12916-014-0159-5

 received in 2014-08-20, accepted in 2014-08-21,  发布年份 2014

【 摘 要 】

New Global Burden of Disease estimates for liver cirrhosis, published in BMC Medicine, suggest that cirrhosis caused over a million deaths in 2010, with a further million due to liver cancer and acute hepatitis. Cause-specific mortality data were very sparse for some regions, particularly in Africa, with no relevant mortality data for 58/187 countries. Liver disease involves infectious, malignant and chronic aetiologies with overlapping symptoms. Where available mortality data come from verbal autopsies, separating different types of liver disease is challenging.

Cirrhosis is a disease of rich and poor alike; key public health risk factors such as alcohol consumption play an important role. Risk-reduction strategies such as controlling the price of alcohol are being widely discussed. Since these estimates used alcohol consumption as a covariate, they cannot be used to explore relationships between alcohol consumption and cirrhosis mortality.

There is hope: coming generations of adults will have been vaccinated against hepatitis B, and this is envisaged to reduce the burden of fatal liver disease. But more complete civil registration globally is needed to fully understand the burden of liver disease.

Please see related article: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/12/145/abstract webcite.

【 授权许可】

   
2014 Byass; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.

【 图 表 】

Figure 1.

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