Abstract:
Standard expected years of life lost (SEYLL) is a measure of the years that might have been lived from the time of death. Although the global burden of disease project attempted to standardize this measure with respect to standard model life tables, authors use alternative standards. Manipulations of SEYLL – discounting, age-weighting, age-standardizing – are also variously applied, and SEYLL may be presented as a total, or per living person, or per death. Further, whenever a death occurs there is potential living time lost, and SEYLL is never zero, or even close to zero, so that reference values for “acceptable” SEYLL are needed in order to assess whether an observed SEYLL really is an adverse contributor to the burden of disease. In this chapter, the way that SEYLL is presented in the literature is discussed and the effects of different manipulations of SEYLL are investigated, in particular, their effect on rank order of causes of death. Reference values, or norms, for SEYLL measures are discussed and these provide a new way to present, and rank by cause of death, total SEYLL by adjusting for normative values.
