Table 2.

Overview of purported premature death measures

Measure	Measurand	Use	Valid?
1. Age-based thresholds	Number of premature deaths as opposed to non-premature deaths	(i), (ii), (v),	(y)
2. Years of potential life lost (YPLL)	Gross loss of life years due to premature death (determined by an age-based threshold)	(i)–(v)	(y)
3. Years of life lost (YLL) in Disability-adjusted life-years (DALY) metric	Gross loss of life years compared to an ideal (society's) life expectancy	(i)–(v)	(y)
4. Preventable mortality	Number of deaths that could be avoided through large-scale public health policy interventions	(i), (ii), (v)	(n)
5. Amenable mortality	Number of deaths that could be avoided through optimal health care	(i), (ii), (v)	(n)
6. Cause-specific mortality (e.g., tobacco-related deaths)	Number of deaths due to causes that by inference makes the death premature	(i), (ii)	(n)
7. Accidental mortality	Number of deaths due to accidental injury	(i), (ii)	(n)

Overview of purported premature death measures by what they measure (measurand), common applications (use) and our verdict of their ability to actually track premature death as we shall understand the concept in this article (valid?). The common applications are: (i) evaluating public health policies after implementation, (ii) identifying targets for policy interventions, (iii) ranking policy interventions before implementation (e.g., cost-effectiveness analysis), (iv) monitoring mortality trends, and (v) evaluating health systems. In this article, we focus on rows 1–3. Rows 4–7 are mentioned for giving a complete overview and further discussion of these fall outside the scope of this article