Global Burden of Disease Study (GBD) Burden of Proof and Risk-Outcome Scores

The Burden of Proof analysis is designed to assess the strength of evidence for epidemiological relationships, considering all pairs of risk factors and health outcomes in the GBD study. For a given risk-outcome pair, the approach generates a score that is based on size of the risk factor effect, agreement of results across studies, and availability of data. The score is obtained using the burden of proof risk function, which is the most conservative effect size consistent with the data. For a harmful risk factor, the burden of proof risk function is the lower bound of uncertainty interval of the log-relative risk, and for a protective risk factor, it is the upper bound. The final risk-outcome score is summarized using stars, with a 5-star rating indicating the strongest evidence, and 1-star score indicating the weakest evidence. Download data from the Burden of Proof data visualization.