Disability-Adjusted Life Years for Communicable Disease in the Korean Burden of Disease Study 2012

Lee, Ye-Rin; Moon, Kanghee; Kim, Young Ae; Park, So-Youn; Oh, Chang-Mo; Lee, Kyung-Suk; Oh, In-Hwan

Among diseases, tuberculosis had the second highest DALYs in 2012. In this study, DALYs for tuberculosis in men were 1.6 times higher than that seen in women. While the volume of total DALYs was largest in the 50-59 years old age group, the DALYs per 100,000 were highest in the ≥ 80 years old age group. The mortality and incidence rates of tuberculosis in Korea per 100,000 were the highest among the OECD countries in 2012 and significantly higher than that of the next closest country, Portugal (10) . In particular, the YLLs for tuberculosis were the highest and accounted for 33.7% of communicable disease YLLs in Korea. Because mortality due to tuberculosis is considered an avoidable death, appropriate health policy intervention and high quality health care, such as primary diagnostic test for HIV patients and management of drug supplies and timely treatment, could prevent many tuberculosis related deaths (18, 19) . Therefore, a strategy to minimize deaths due to tuberculosis should be undertaken to minimize the burden of tuberculosis. For example, adoption of the WHO Directly Observed Treatment Shortcourse (DOTS) therapy, a 6 month antituberculosis drug treatment program, would be a cost-effective intervention. For example, the DOTS program had a tuberculosis treatment rate of 86% globally in 2013 (20) .