Key Lab of Northwest Water Resources, Environment and Ecology, Ministry of Education, Xi'an University of Architecture and Technology, Xi'an 710055, China.
Key Lab of Northwest Water Resources, Environment and Ecology, Ministry of Education, Xi'an University of Architecture and Technology, Xi'an 710055, China.
Sci Total Environ. 2015 Apr 1;511:268-87. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2014.11.048. Epub 2014 Dec 27.
Disability adjusted life year (DALY) has been widely used since 1990s for evaluating global and/or regional burden of diseases. As many environmental pollutants are hazardous to human health, DALY is also recognized as an indicator to quantify the health impact of environmental pollution related to disease burden. Based on literature reviews, this article aims to give an overview of the applicable methodologies and research directions for using DALY as a tool for quantitative assessment of environmental pollution. With an introduction of the methodological framework of DALY, the requirements on data collection and manipulation for quantifying disease burdens are summarized. Regarding environmental pollutants hazardous to human beings, health effect/risk evaluation is indispensable for transforming pollution data into disease data through exposure and dose-response analyses which need careful selection of models and determination of parameters. Following the methodological discussions, real cases are analyzed with attention paid to chemical pollutants and pathogens usually encountered in environmental pollution. It can be seen from existing studies that DALY is advantageous over conventional environmental impact assessment for quantification and comparison of the risks resulted from environmental pollution. However, further studies are still required to standardize the methods of health effect evaluation regarding varied pollutants under varied circumstances before DALY calculation.
伤残调整生命年（DALY）自 20 世纪 90 年代以来被广泛用于评估全球和/或区域疾病负担。由于许多环境污染物对人类健康有害，DALY 也被认为是量化与疾病负担相关的环境污染对健康影响的指标。本文基于文献综述，旨在概述将 DALY 用作定量评估环境污染的工具的适用方法和研究方向。本文在介绍 DALY 的方法学框架的基础上，总结了量化疾病负担的数据收集和处理要求。对于对人类健康有害的环境污染物，需要通过暴露和剂量-反应分析将污染数据转化为疾病数据，这需要仔细选择模型并确定参数，因此健康效应/风险评估是必不可少的。在讨论方法学之后，本文通过对环境污染中通常遇到的化学污染物和病原体的实际案例进行分析，指出与传统的环境影响评估相比，DALY 有利于量化和比较环境污染造成的风险。然而，在进行 DALY 计算之前，仍需要进一步研究针对不同情况下的不同污染物，对健康效应评估方法进行标准化。
