Leading causes of disease burden

Ranking diseases by burden shows the leading causes of health loss in Australia. Changes in rankings over time may be due to changes in disease prevalence, epidemics or changes to how causes of data is collected, reported or coded. 

In this interactive graph, leading causes of death and disease burden (YLL, YLD or DALY) can be ranked by the number or by the age-standardised rate (ASR) in the population.

Note that an increase in rank over time does not always mean the disease or injury has increased in the population, and vice versa. Therefore changes in ranking of causes of deaths and disease burden over time should be interpreted with caution. In addition, leading causes of death in this data visualisation is based on Australian Burden of Disease Study 2015 methods and will not be comparable to other reports of leading causes of death due to modelling and cause of death alignment to diseases

Use the ‘Rank by ASR’ interactive graph to explore the leading 25 causes of disease burden (YLL, YLD or DALY) in Australia, by age-standardised rate for 2003, 2011 and 2015, or the ‘Rank by number’ interactive graph to explore rankings by number of YLL, YLD or DALY.