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The core of the
proposed Program Project on The Global Burden of Disease in Aging populations
plays a central role in coordinating the activities of the eight research
teams, in terms of administrative, data and methodological needs. The
administrative component of the core provides support to the eight research
projects. The data component of the
core will create a Global Databank, using the prototype and software developed
by the Harvard-MIT Data Center. The
core also includes a methods component for development, adaptation, and
refinement of statistical methods that will be useful to every component of the
program. The core is based at the
Harvard Burden of Disease Unit at the Harvard Center for Population and
Development Studies.
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| Measurement of
Adult Mortality in the Developing World |
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The goal of this
project is to improve our knowledge of, and ability to measure, adult mortality
in the developing world. This project
will compile data sets relevant to the measurement of adult mortality for selected
countries representing all regions of the developing world. We will evaluate the data sets and carry out
adjustments as necessary, explore and quantify the performance of the
methodologies available for evaluating such data sets and deriving mortality
estimates from them, and develop methodologies as necessary to improve
estimation validity.
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| Non-communicable
Disease Mortality Transitions |
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The goal of this
project is to improve the quality of cause of death information for public
health research and planning. The study
will provide a more scientific basis for using cause of death data needed for
estimating global and regional mortality patterns. A related broad goal is to study the transition in
non-communicable disease mortality rates to shed light on a key controversy in
public health: whether age-specific death rates for non-communicable diseases
rise or decline with economic development. The first component of the project will focus on developing analytical
procedures to correct for miscertification of deaths from ischaemic heart
disease, cancers and other major chronic diseases. Another critical component of the project will be to use
corrected cause of death data to analyze long-term trends in age-specific
non-communicable disease mortality rates to examine the extent to which
income-elastic risk factors for major non-communicable diseases affect
mortality trends.
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Adapting Statistical Methods for Public Health Research |
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The goal of this
project is to analyze some existing statistical methods in public health,
import relevant ones from other fields, and develop new ones to facilitate the
analysis of available data. First, this
project will develop models to assure the consistency of estimates of
epidemiological data within diseases, on measures of incidence, prevalence,
mortality and disability, as well as across diseases. Second, this study will explore logistic regression, the most
commonly used method in epidemiology and much of public health. The final component of the study will extend
methods for ecological inference, the estimation of individual-level relationships
when only aggregate data are available, to the types of data and problems
common in public health.
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Self-Reported and Observed Measures of Health Status |
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The goals of this project are to understand the
translation of observed health status of self-reported health status and if
this translation differs by socio-economic groups; and to determine how
self-reported health status information can estimate the value of health. The results will be important for research
purposes and will directly contribute in assessing the burden of non-fatal
health outcomes particularly for the elderly within the Global Burden of
Disease 2000, which will be disseminated widely by the World Health
Organization. These results would improve the comparability and interpretation of self-reported health status
measures across and within populations.
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Summary Measures of Population Health |
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In the past decade,
there has been a marked increase in the development, calculation and use of
summary measures of population health, which combine information on mortality
and non-fatal health outcomes. This
study seeks to improve the conceptual, methodological and empirical basis for
the calculation of summary measures.
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Health Costs of Aging, Present and Future Trends |
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This sub-component
aims to introduce direct costs of care into the discussion of the population
impact of diseases. In developing
countries, data sets from national insurance schemes are not available and it
will be necessary to develop methods for data collection. The long-term goal is to build an
information base showing country variations in the direct costs of aging.
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