Measuring progress and projecting attainment on the basis of past trends of the health-related Sustainable Development Goals in 188 countries: an analysis from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2016

The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are grounded in the global ambition of “leaving no one behind”. Understanding today’s gains and gaps for the health-related SDGs is essential for decision makers as they aim to improve the health of populations. As part of the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2016 (GBD 2016), we measured 37 of the 50 health-related SDG indicators over the period 1990–2016 for 188 countries, and then on the basis of these past trends, we projected indicators to 2030

Global, regional, and national incidence, prevalence, and years lived with disability for 328 diseases and injuries for 195 countries, 1990–2016: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2016

As mortality rates decline, life expectancy increases, and populations age, non-fatal outcomes of diseases and injuries are becoming a larger component of the global burden of disease. The Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2016 (GBD 2016) provides a comprehensive assessment of prevalence, incidence, and years lived with disability (YLDs) for 328 causes in 195 countries and territories from 1990 to 2016

Global, regional, and national under-5 mortality, adult mortality, age-specific mortality, and life expectancy, 1970–2016: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2016

BACKGROUND: Detailed assessments of mortality patterns, particularly age-specific mortality, represent a crucial input that enables health systems to target interventions to specific populations. Understanding how all-cause mortality has changed with respect to development status can identify exemplars for best practice. To accomplish this, the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2016 (GBD 2016) estimated age-specific and sex-specific all-cause mortality between 1970 and 2016 for 195 countries and territories and at the subnational level for the five countries with a population greater than 200 million in 2016. METHODS: We have evaluated how well civil registration systems captured deaths using a set of demographic methods called death distribution methods for adults and from consideration of survey and census data for children younger than 5 years. We generated an overall assessment of completeness of registration of deaths by dividing registered deaths in each location-year by our estimate of all-age deaths generated from our overall estimation process. For 163 locations, including subnational units in countries with a population greater than 200 million with complete vital registration (VR) systems, our estimates were largely driven by the observed data, with corrections for small fluctuations in numbers and estimation for recent years where there were lags in data reporting (lags were variable by location, generally between 1 year and 6 years). For other locations, we took advantage of different data sources available to measure under-5 mortality rates (U5MR) using complete birth histories, summary birth histories, and incomplete VR with adjustments; we measured adult mortality rate (the probability of death in individuals aged 15-60 years) using adjusted incomplete VR, sibling histories, and household death recall. We used the U5MR and adult mortality rate, together with crude death rate due to HIV in the GBD model life table system, to estimate age-specific and sex-specific death rates for each location-year. Using various international databases, we identified fatal discontinuities, which we defined as increases in the death rate of more than one death per million, resulting from conflict and terrorism, natural disasters, major transport or technological accidents, and a subset of epidemic infectious diseases; these were added to estimates in the relevant years. In 47 countries with an identified peak adult prevalence for HIV/AIDS of more than 0·5% and where VR systems were less than 65% complete, we informed our estimates of age-sex-specific mortality using the Estimation and Projection Package (EPP)-Spectrum model fitted to national HIV/AIDS prevalence surveys and antenatal clinic serosurveillance systems. We estimated stillbirths, early neonatal, late neonatal, and childhood mortality using both survey and VR data in spatiotemporal Gaussian process regression models. We estimated abridged life tables for all location-years using age-specific death rates. We grouped locations into development quintiles based on the Socio-demographic Index (SDI) and analysed mortality trends by quintile. Using spline regression, we estimated the expected mortality rate for each age-sex group as a function of SDI. We identified countries with higher life expectancy than expected by comparing observed life expectancy to anticipated life expectancy on the basis of development status alone. FINDINGS: Completeness in the registration of deaths increased from 28% in 1970 to a peak of 45% in 2013; completeness was lower after 2013 because of lags in reporting. Total deaths in children younger than 5 years decreased from 1970 to 2016, and slower decreases occurred at ages 5-24 years. By contrast, numbers of adult deaths increased in each 5-year age bracket above the age of 25 years. The distribution of annualised rates of change in age-specific mortality rate differed over the period 2000 to 2016 compared with earlier decades: increasing annualised rates of change were less frequent, although rising annualised rates of change still occurred in some locations, particularly for adolescent and younger adult age groups. Rates of stillbirths and under-5 mortality both decreased globally from 1970. Evidence for global convergence of death rates was mixed; although the absolute difference between age-standardised death rates narrowed between countries at the lowest and highest levels of SDI, the ratio of these death rates-a measure of relative inequality-increased slightly. There was a strong shift between 1970 and 2016 toward higher life expectancy, most noticeably at higher levels of SDI. Among countries with populations greater than 1 million in 2016, life expectancy at birth was highest for women in Japan, at 86·9 years (95% UI 86·7-87·2), and for men in Singapore, at 81·3 years (78·8-83·7) in 2016. Male life expectancy was generally lower than female life expectancy between 1970 and 2016, an

On Robust Bayesian Analysis for Location and Scale Parameters

AbstractDawid (1973,Biometrika60, 664–666) stated conditions in the univariate location model with known scale parameter needed for there to be either vanishing likelihood or prior influence on the posterior distribution when there is a conflict between likelihood and prior. More recently, Pericchi and Sansó (1995,Biometrika82, 223–225) noted that there are distributions that partially satisfy Dawid's conditions but have bounded rather than vanishing influence on the posterior distribution. In this paper, we present the extension of these results for the location and scale model using the multivariatev-spherical distributions. We show that when thev(·)=‖·‖ function is a norm, the ‖‖-spherical distributions, exponential power, and logistic power provide a robust analysis for the location model with known scale parameter, whereas Student's powertprovides a robust analysis for the location and scale model. Robust analyses are illustrated for normal-gamma prior location and scale models. Numerical computations are implemented via the Gibbs sampler

Agricultural systems regulate plant and insect (beetle) diversity and induce ecosystem novelty

Land-use change plays an important role in shaping plant and insect diversity over long time timescales. Great Britain provides an ideal case study to investigate patterns of long-term vegetation and insect diversity change owing to the existence of spatially and temporally extensive environmental archives (lake sediments, peatlands, and archaeological sites) and a long history of landscape transformation through agrarian change. The trends identified in past environmental datasets allow the impacts of land-use change on plant and insect diversity trends to be investigated alongside exploration of the emergence of ecological novelty. Using fossil pollen, insect (beetle), archaeodemographic, archaeobotanical and modern landscape datasets covering Britain, similarities are identified between insect diversity and pollen sample evenness indicating that vegetation heterogeneity influences insect diversity. Changing land use captured by archaeobotanical data is significantly correlated with pollen diversity demonstrating the role of human activity in shaping past diversity trends with shifts towards ecosystem novelty identified in the form of non-analogue pollen taxa assemblages (unique species combinations). Modern landscapes with higher agricultural suitability are less likely to have pollen analogues beyond the last 1000 years, whilst those in areas less suited to agriculture and on more variable topography are more likely to have analogues older than 1000 years. This signifies the role of agriculture in the creation of novel ecosystems. Ecological assemblages characteristic of earlier periods of the Holocene may persist in areas less affected by agriculture. The last 200 years has witnessed major shifts in novelty in a low number of pollen sites suggesting that novel ecosystems emerged over a longer time period resulting from the cumulative impacts of land-use change.</p