yll
- Why should I use
it?The purpose of the package yll
is to easily compute the
standard expected years of life lost (YLL), as developed by the Global
Burden of Disease Study (Murray, C.J., Lopez, A.D. and World Health
Organization, 1996). The YLL is based on comparing the age of death to
an external standard life expectancy curve. The goal of the package
yll
is also to easily compute the average YLL, which
highlights premature causes of death and brings attention to preventable
deaths (Aragon et al., 2008).
You can install the released version of yll
from CRAN with:
install.packages("yll")
and load the package with:
library(yll)
To compute the YLL or the average YLL, you need at least:
Other arguments (i.e., discount.rate
,
beta
, modulation
and adjustment
)
have default values and are thus not obligatory. However, you can still
always modify them by specifying the argument and the desired value. See
also the help documentation of the package by calling ?yll
or ?avg_yll
in R.
Below examples of both functions included in the package.
yll()
For instance, imagine there are 100 deaths with an average age of
death of 60 years and an expected remaining number of years to live of
20 years, the yll()
function included in the
yll
package would look like this:
<- yll(100, 60, 20)
res
res#> [1] 1503.961
The standard expected years of life lost in our case is thus 1503.96
years. This includes a discounting rate of 0.03 (default rate). To
perform the same computation without discounting rate, you specify
discount.rate = 0
in the argument of the yll()
function:
<- yll(100, 60, 20, discount.rate = 0)
res
res#> [1] 2000
The standard expected years of life lost without discounting is now 2000 years.
avg_yll()
It is also possible to compute the average years of life lost, thanks
to the function avg_yll()
included in the yll
package. Compared to the standard YLL, the average YLL highlights
premature causes of death and brings attention to preventable deaths.
Mathematically, it is found by dividing the standard YLL by the number
of deaths. It can, however, be easily computed via the function
avg_yll()
:
<- avg_yll(100, 60, 20)
res
res#> [1] 15.03961
Again, this includes a discount rate of 0.03. To remove the discount rate, set it to 0:
<- avg_yll(100, 60, 20, discount.rate = 0)
res
res#> [1] 20
Aragon, T. J., Lichtensztajn, D. Y., Katcher, B. S., Reiter, R., & Katz, M. H. (2008). Calculating expected years of life lost for assessing local ethnic disparities in causes of premature death. BMC public health, 8(1), 116.
Murray, C. J., Lopez, A. D., & World Health Organization. (1996). The global burden of disease: a comprehensive assessment of mortality and disability from diseases, injuries, and risk factors in 1990 and projected to 2020: summary.