Avoidable burden of disease: conceptual and methodological issues in substance abuse epidemiology
✍ Scribed by Jürgen Rehm; Benjamin Taylor; Jayadeep Patra; Gerhard Gmel
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2006
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 214 KB
- Volume
- 15
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1049-8931
- DOI
- 10.1002/mpr.199
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Determining the proportion of avoidable disease burden attributable to substance use is important for both policy development and intervention implementation. Current epidemiological theory has in principle provided a method to estimate avoidable burden of disease and the available statistical tools can provide fi rst rough estimates. The method described in this paper, and its statistical procedures, are exemplifi ed to estimate avoidable burden of tobacco-related disease in Canada. However, further effort is needed to fi nd solutions in the methodological details, namely exposure measurement, risk factor multidimensionality, estimation of changes in exposure distribution over time, and estimation of risk relationships from multiple exposures changing over time with multiple endpoints (causal webs). The impetus to begin refi ning methods to obtain better starting points for estimating avoidable burden of disease is obvious and should be carried through in order to see real changes through evidence-based policy and intervention.