Original articleSocioeconomic Disparity in Global Burden of Cataract: An Analysis for 2013 With Time Trends Since 1990
Section snippets
Study Design
This is an international, comparative burden-of-disease study.
Global Burden of Cataract
Global burden of cataract (ICD-10 codes H25-H26 and H28-H28.210) had been estimated in terms of age-standardized DALYs per 100 000 population in the GBD 2013 study including 188 countries.7 Methods to compute age-standardized DALY rates have been described previously in the GBD 2013 study.7 The following GBD 2013 data concerning cataract were collected from the Global Health Data Exchange11: (1) national age-standardized DALY rates
Socioeconomic Disparity in Cataract Burden
HDI data in 2013 were available for 183 countries, including 47 very high-HDI, 51 high-HDI, 42 medium-HDI, and 43 low-HDI countries. Kruskal-Wallis tests indicated significant difference in age-standardized DALY rates across countries with different levels of socioeconomic development (P < .01). Multiple comparisons by Mann-Whitney U tests suggested higher age-standardized DALY rates in lower-HDI countries (Figure 1). The medians (interquartile ranges) of age-standardized DALY rates were 101.0
Discussion
This study revealed that global health progress in cataract has been accompanied by widening inequality since 1990. Countries with lower levels of socioeconomic development are found to have higher cataract burden. The socioeconomic-associated inequality in global cataract burden has been increasing since 2000, with burden being more concentrated in less developed countries.
According to the GBD 2010 study, the global age-standardized prevalence of blindness and MSVI owing to cataract reduced by
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