Global, regional, and national age-sex-specifc mortality for 282 causes of death in 195 countries and territories, 1980–2017: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2017

Global development goals increasingly rely on country-specifc estimates for benchmarking a nation’s
progress. To meet this need, the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) 2016 estimated
global, regional, national, and, for selected locations, subnational cause-specifc mortality beginning in the year
1980. Here we report an update to that study, making use of newly available data and improved methods. GBD 2017
provides a comprehensive assessment of cause-specifc mortality for 282 causes in 195 countries and territories from
1980 to 2017.
Methods The causes of death database is composed of vital registration (VR), verbal autopsy (VA), registry, survey,
police, and surveillance data. GBD 2017 added ten VA studies, 127 country-years of VR data, 502 cancer-registry
country-years, and an additional surveillance country-year. Expansions of the GBD cause of death hierarchy resulted
in 18 additional causes estimated for GBD 2017. Newly available data led to subnational estimates for fve additional
countries—Ethiopia, Iran, New Zealand, Norway, and Russia. Deaths assigned International Classifcation of Diseases
(ICD) codes for non-specifc, implausible, or intermediate causes of death were reassigned to underlying causes by
redistribution algorithms that were incorporated into uncertainty estimation. We used statistical modelling tools
developed for GBD, including the Cause of Death Ensemble model (CODEm), to generate cause fractions and causespecifc death rates for each location, year, age, and sex. Instead of using UN estimates as in previous versions,
GBD 2017 independently estimated population size and fertility rate for all locations. Years of life lost (YLLs) were
then calculated as the sum of each death multiplied by the standard life expectancy at each age. All rates reported here
are age-standardised