At high thresholds, utility weights, discount rates and the epidemiology of smoking-related diseases are the three most important factors for all countries, except for Belgium which had almost the same discount rates as in the Netherlands.
Besides statistical uncertainty (sampling variation) with regard to costs and effects, every economic evaluation may contain some degree of data imprecision (e.g. resource costs/prices) and methodological controversy (e.g. derivation of utility weights, discount rate), which should be accounted for.
They are an imperfect measure and depend on value judgements for the disability weighting, discounting and age-weighting and on the life table used [85], [86].
The methodological approach for the WE-DALY can be extended to include discounting and age-weighting: discounting would be applied during the calculation of the YLL and age-weighting would be applied to both the YLL and YLD calculations.
Some of the limitations of the DALY approach refer to the parameters used for the their calculation, such as social preferences to establish the disability weights, discounting and age weighting.
Based on these results, 1-way sensitivity analyses using the full model were performed on vaccine parameters (duration, degree, coverage, cost, target age), quality-of-life weights, discounting, and duration of natural immunity.
They can be descriptive (such as relative risks, duration estimates, or attributable fractions) or normative (such as maximum life expectancy, severity weights, policy norms, age weights and discount factors).
The use of age weights and discount factors has been discussed – and heavily debated – elsewhere (for example [ 14, 15]).
Percentages of components are calculated on a dry weight basis, discounting amount of ash present in each sample.
Age weights and discount rates were used in this analysis to allow comparison with the GBD 2004 update.
