The DALY Show, Disability-Adjusted Life Year (DALY)

James G. Kahn MD, MPH
Professor of Health Policy, Epidemiology,
and Global Health at UCSF
This animated video provides a thorough, technically informative, understandable, and fun introduction to DALYs and how they are used to measure the burden of disease.

[@sfbayglobalhealthresearch6618]

Amazing! Dr Kahn actually did the voice-over, sounds like a pro! Clear and engaging description. :)

[@erickgryzbowski7658]

An awesome explanation wing practices carried complex concepts simply and with everyday terms. Thank you very much

[@compuchemgeek]

Thanks, I have been looking for a clear explanation of DALYs, glad I found this video

[@snsh5293]

Crystal clear understanding of the concept and more importantly, its implementations. THANK YOU SO MUCH.

[@Nadylisa]

This was so well explained. Thank you Dr Kahn.

[@masoudrafee2046]

Exclusive and exhillerating. the very thing I needed in simple terms and succinct form. thanks a million

[@sathishk9696]

Thanks for this video.

[@lesliethompson1995]

Very helpful for my grad school health demography class. Great explanation. Thanks!

[@birrymays]

Very informative and helpful. Thank you.

[@derkompetenzentwickler]

Amazing! perfect video

[@trknigatu]

Good great summary of DALY

[@MarcusWhybrow]

Thanks. Was reading Bjorn Lomborg's "How to Spend $75 Billion to Make the World a Better Place" and I'd never heard of a DALY before.

[@ts8024]

That was very informative!

[@vishalkumarchaubey989]

Well explained

[@andrewmcguire5005]

I heard a rumor that Jon Stewart was lined up to voice-over the follow-up video.

[@GartenKinder]

How do they come up with a DALY figure for a disease that affects people of any age equally, so their DALY score just depends on how old they are when they get the disease?

[@ks6073]

This is very well done! Thank you for an engaging and concise overview. However, Neglected Zoonotic Diseases competing against funding for the big 3 (AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria) which makes it challenging to address research and development in this area. What are some ways to acquire funding for R&D to enhance interventions and improve health outcomes for NZDs if DALYs are the main criterion?

[@Lalorama]

I'm curious about the discount rate. How does it lead to treatment being more valuable than prevention? Seems counter intuitive. Prevention would avoid future growing costs of treatment, so shouldn't it be valued more highly?

[@JimGKahn]

Good question. The benefits of treatment are generally immediate, so minimally discounted. The benefits of prevention are often quite delayed, hence substantially discounted. Yet the costs for both are immediate, and not discounted ...

[@elfadil95]

At minute 6:07 what types of graphs are those? And how do you read them?

[@JimGKahn]

I'm not sure what they're called. They present distributions (of DALYs by disease). You read them by going to a spot on the horizontal axis, eg an age, and the colors above indicated the distribution of DALY burden by disease. Since the total is set to 100%, they don't tell you the overall DALY burden at that age (you could use absolute numbers instead of %s to get at that).

[@leonardleader8166]

What software did you use to generate this video. I would be very keen to know

[@aphrodiosa]

This was designed in Illustrator and animated in After Effects in 2014 at UC Berkeley

[@Glioma-uw2zz]

👍

[@Harryyy26]

Thanks for this video.