30.L. Workshop: European burden of disease network: strengthening the collaboration
Authors:   Organised by: COST Action CA18218,   Chair persons: Brecht Devleesschauwer - Belgium, Milena Šantrić Milićević - Serbia
Published: October 2020

The burden of disease (BoD) approach has become one of the foundations of descriptive epidemiology. Central to this approach is the use of the Disability-Adjusted Life Year as a comprehensive and comparable summary measure of population health. Driven by the impact of the Global Burden of Disease (BoD) study, several researchers and health institutes across the world have adopted the BoD approach to assess the health impact of diseases and risk factors, supporting a more rational allocation of available resources.

Despite the increasing prominence of the BoD approach, several challenges remain. The BoD methodology is complex and highly data intensive, which has led to major disparities across researchers and nations in their capacity to perform BoD studies, to interpret the soundness of available BoD estimates, or to advocate for the use of BoD methods. Often, these disparities follow geographical boundaries–for instance, over half of all published BoD studies in Europe were set in the Netherlands, Spain and UK, while only 15% were set in eastern European countries. BoD as a generally standardized approach nonetheless requires different methodological choices, and lack of harmonization in these may hamper comparisons across studies. This is further aggravated by the fact that different BoD initiatives have remained scattered–there is for instance little interaction between infectious disease, nutritional and environmental epidemiologists, even though several methodological issues transcend the boundaries of diseases and risk factors. Finally, many BoD researchers are struggling to find optimal ways to translate their findings and communicate them adequately and comprehensively to decision makers and other stakeholders.

In response to these needs, several countries and BoD researchers have set up ad hoc partnerships. In 2016, the WHO Regional Office for Europe (WHO-EURO) launched a European BoD network, aiming to intensify links between WHO, IHME and the WHO-EURO member states. In 2019, our group has launched a COST Action that aims to serve as a technical platform to integrate and strengthen capacity in BoD assessment across Europe and beyond. At the moment of writing, the “burden-eu” COST Action joins over 200 participants from 38 European countries, as well as several observers from non-European countries and international organizations. In this workshop, we give an overview of the current status and initial accomplishments of the COST Action, with a focus on the key challenges that the Action aims to address - i.e., increased interaction between existing efforts, methodological advances and technical capacity building at country level, and an actionable understanding of the process underlying knowledge translation. The different sessions will include interactions with the audience to learn about the needs and expectations of the attendees, and how these can be addressed by the COST Action.

Key messages

The burden of disease approach is increasingly used to generate comparable and comprehensive estimates of the health impact of diseases and risk factors. The 'burden-eu' COST Action offers a technical platform for integrating and strengthening capacity in burden of disease assessment across Europe and beyond.