Significance
In the developed world, mortality counts and rates tend to emphasize the most common causes of death in older people, because the risk of death increases with age. Because PYLL gives more weight to deaths among younger individuals, it is the favoured metric among those who wish to draw attention to those causes of death that are more common in younger people. Some researchers say that this measurement should be considered by governments when they decide how best to divide up scarce resources for research.
For example, in most of the developed world, heart disease and cancer are the leading causes of death, as measured by the number (or rate) of deaths. For this reason, heart disease and cancer tend to get a lot of attention (and research funding). However, one might argue that everyone has to die of something eventually, and so public health efforts should be more explicitly directed at preventing premature death. When PYLL is used as an explicit measure of premature death, then injuries and infectious diseases, become more important. While the most common cause of death of young people aged 5 to 40 is injury and poisoning in the developed world, because relatively few young people die, the principal causes of lost years remain cardiovascular disease and cancer.
| Cause of premature death | Person-years lost |
|---|---|
| Cancer | 8,628,000 person-years |
| Heart disease and strokes | 8,760,000 person-years |
| Accidents and other injuries | 5,873,000 person-years |
| All other causes | 13,649,000 person-years |
Read more about this topic: Years Of Potential Life Lost
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