Disability plays a central role in determining the overall health of a population, yet it hadn't been measured comprehensively until the Global Burden of Disease Project published its findings in 1996. The leading causes of disability are markedly different from the leading causes of death, and this casts serious doubt on the practice of judging a population's health from its mortality data alone. This table shows, for instance, that unipolar depression alone was responsible for one in every 10 years of life lived with disability in 1990.
Figure.
Reproduced with permission from Murray CJL, Lopez AD. The global burden of disease. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996