Systematic review of environmental burden of disease in Canada

Specifically, the following sections include: (1) a review of the methods used to identify relevant EBD studies and supporting literature; (2) a summary of background information on the original burden of disease studies and methodologies for calculating EBD and EAFs; (3) a review and synthesis of available global, regional, national, and local EBD studies that are most relevant to Canada; and (4) [...] A guiding principle of the GBD study was that almost all sources of health data were likely to contain useful information, and expert judgment based on the collaboration of more than 100 scientists from more than 20 countries was used to evaluate the literature and derive estimates of the burden of disease and injury attributable to identified risk factors (Murray and Lopez 1999; Lopez et al. [...] Additionally, the initial GBD study raised a number of methodological issues with respect to the ability to make comparable assessments of the burden of disease due to a lack of standardized methods and differences in the reliability of the underlying epidemiological studies of relative risk and population exposure levels (Murray and Lopez 1999; Lopez et al. [...] To estimate attributable burden under the revised GBD framework, the following types of data were needed: (1) relative risks for each cause of death and disability as a function of exposure level, (2) the current (and past for time lagged variables) levels of exposure, (3) the counterfactual distribution of exposure, and (4) the burden of disease due to each cause of death and disability in a give [...] The primary objectives of this workshop were to (1) provide methodological guidance on the quantitative assessment of the burden of disease from environmental risk factors at national or regional level, and (2) create a network of experts interested in developing the conceptual and practical implementation of environmental disease burden assessment.