Abstract
Purpose :
To assess the association between socioeconomic status (SES) and global burden of some of the major eye diseases among males and females in various age groups, using systematic metric of disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs)
Methods :
We used the results of the Global Burden of Diseases (GBD 2015), Injuries, and Risk Factors 2015, provided by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. SES was measured by education, occupation, and average household income. The GBD was estimated using the metric of disability-adjusted life year (DALY), which is the sum of years lived with disability (YLDs) plus years of life lost to a disease (YLLs). Under sense organ diseases, this database provided results of five eyes diseases including refraction and accommodation disorders, cataract, glaucoma, macular degeneration and other vision loss.
Results :
Sense organ conditions related to vision contributed 0.86% to the global burden of disease measured in DALYs from 313 diseases and injuries in 2015. Individual diseases varied from 0.59% of total burden for refraction and accommodation disorders, 0.16% for cataract, 0.02% for glaucoma, and 0.02% for macular degeneration. Sense organ conditions related to vision were responsible for 21.2 million DALYs in 2015. The age-standardized percent change in DALY rate from 2005 to 2015 was 12.3% (Table 1). The changes of age-standardized DALYs of different eye conditions between 2005 and 2015 among different SES groups are shown in figure 1. Highest DALYs for both cataracts and refractive and accommodation disorders were in lower-middle, while for glaucoma was in upper-middle and for macular degeneration was in high income group.
Conclusions :
Sense organ diseases including vision loss, hearing loss and other sensory losses are the 7th leading causes of global DALYs in GBD 2015. The rate of GBD DALYs of sense organ conditions related to vision has increased between 2005 and 2015 in all income classes. The increase was more prominent in the lower middle group after 2010. Our study suggests that there is ample opportunity to reduce healthcare inequality through the development of targeted policy that is focused on improving the main determinants of health.
This is an abstract that was submitted for the 2018 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Honolulu, Hawaii, April 29 - May 3, 2018.