[The burden of disease in Catalonia, Spain, using disability-adjusted life years (2005-2010)]

Burden of disease allows measuring the health of the population including mortality and disability. The objectives of this paper are to estimate the burden of disease in Catalonia, to compare the results with Spain and Tarragones area and to assess the contribution of the local registers to the estimation of the disability.

We calculated the disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) for 123 causes using the methodology developed by the World Health Organization. We compared the standardized rates with the Spanish rates. In Tarragones area, we calculated the DALYs, we compared them with the DALYs in Catalonia and moreover we used the cancer incidence local registry to calculate cancer burden disease.

There were 801,140 DALYs (annual average) in Catalonia, 60.3% due to disability and 39.7% due to premature mortality. Neuropsychiatric disorders (30.9%), malignant neoplasms (15.8%) and cardiovascular diseases (11.3%) were the leading causes. The standardized rate of respiratory diseases (7.5 per 1,000) was significantly higher compared with the Spanish rate. Perinatal conditions (3.1 per 1,000), intentional injuries (2.2 per 1,000) and digestive diseases (4.9 per 1,000) were significantly higher in Tarragones area. DALYs attributable to cancer showed an increase of 13.4 % when they were calculated using the incidence of cases.

Noncommunicable diseases were the leading causes for DALYs in Catalonia. There are differences between territories in respiratory diseases, perinatal conditions, digestive diseases and intentional injures. Local registries can be very useful in order to calculate the DALYs.