In This Section
Explore our Research by Country
IHME's research spans the globe. From estimates for maternal and child mortality to childhood vaccination rates to insecticide-treated bed net coverage, IHME is measuring health, tracking performance of health programs, and identifying ways to maximize health improvement throughout the world. Most of our research looks at all countries, while some research is specific to a single country or involves a group of countries.
Discover IHME’s research and ongoing projects through the interactive map
Country-specific
This study proposes five general principles for cause of death model development, validation, and reporting and details an analytical tool – the Cause of Death Ensemble model (CODEm) – that explores a large number of possible models to estimate trends in causes of death. CODEm produces better estimates of cause of death trends than previous methods.
Noncommunicable diseases and related risk factors are the leading causes of disease burden in Iran and other middle-income countries. High blood pressure caused 80,000 deaths in Iran in 2005, and hyperglycemia caused 34,000 deaths in that year.
Compared to four other risk factors, high systolic blood pressure had the largest impact on mortality in Iran, causing an estimated 80,000 annual deaths in 2005, according to researchers at the Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Harvard School of Public Health, the Iranian Ministry of Health and Medical Education, IHME, and Imperial College London.
Avahan, a program aimed at preventing HIV in India, averted an estimated 100,178 HIV infections between 2003 and 2008, according to researchers at IHME, the Public Health Foundation of India, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare of India, and the University of Hong Kong.
More than half of the countries around the world are lowering maternal and child mortality at an accelerated rate, according to a study conducted by researchers at IHME and the University of Queensland.
Choosing the best method for verbal autopsy (VA) requires the appropriate metrics to assess a given method’s performance, and researchers from IHME and the University of Queensland undertook a study to determine these metrics.
The vital registration system in Mexico relies on information collected from death certificates to generate official mortality figures. A study by researchers at IHME and the National Institute of Public Health in Mexico set out to test the validity of this system.
An innovative method of computer-coded verbal autopsy, the Random Forest (RF) Method from machine learning, was found to outperform physician-certified verbal autopsy (PCVA) in almost all settings, according to a study by researchers from IHME and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as part of the Population Health Metrics Research Consortium (PHMRC).
Between 2000 and 2007, life expectancies in more than 80% of United States counties fell in standing against the average of the 10 nations with the best life expectancies in the world, according to new research by IHME, in collaboration with researchers from Imperial College London.
In South Africa, deaths from HIV/AIDS are often misclassified as being caused by another condition, according to a study by IHME researchers. The study found that more than 90% of HIV/AIDS deaths from 1996 to 2006 were incorrectly attributed to other causes.
Researchers at IHME have created a new approach for generating estimates of health trends in counties and other small population areas. They used this new small area estimation methodology to estimate the prevalence of diagnosed diabetes in all counties in the United States for 2008, in this study.
A program in India that pays women to give birth in a health facility appears to be saving newborns’ lives and lowering the number of stillbirths, as demonstrated by research conducted by IHME.
Research shows that more than 44,000 Iranian children under the age of 15 died due to injuries between 2001 and 2006, making injuries the leading cause of death among children in Iran.
Life expectancy in the US is shortened by more than four years because of preventable risk factors such as smoking and being overweight, IHME researchers found.
The rate of diabetes in the US varies widely state to state, as does the rate of diagnosis, depending in part on which state a person lives in, race, and whether the person has insurance. This is the first study to examine the prevalence of diabetes and the proportion of undiagnosed diabetes state by state.
Researchers found that self-rated national health studies are too inconsistent to be used to measure trends in overall population health.
Research shows that Americans are hearing better today than they were 30 years ago, but progress on reducing hearing loss has slowed.
Iran has the highest death rate resulting from road traffic accidents of any country in the world, according to a study conducted by IHME researchers.
Smoking, high blood pressure, and being overweight or obese are responsible for the largest number of preventable deaths in the United States, research shows.
Research shows that Mexico’s recent health reforms appear to have considerably reduced catastrophic and out-of-pocket health spending on both inpatient and outpatient medical procedures, especially among the poor.
According to new research, declining mean systolic blood pressure (SBP) in Japan between 1986 and 2002 could be attributed to the increased use of antihypertensive medications, particularly among older adults, and lowered mean body mass index (BMI) in young women.
Research into a novel application of Bayesian inference shows that this method demonstrates considerable success in estimating the number of hospital admissions due to external causes based on injury diagnosis.
Despite gains in overall life expectancy in the United States between 1961 and 1999, the life expectancy of a significant segment of the population is actually declining or, at best, stagnating, according to new research.
Research shows that women suffer more from uncontrolled hypertension than men in every state, with the greatest prevalence of uncontrolled hypertension in the Southern United States.
Researchers at IHME propose a method of estimating cause-specific mortality fractions (CSMFs), or the fraction of all deaths due to a specific cause.
Research published in PLoS Medicine in November 2007 validated a novel method for analyzing verbal autopsy data (the symptom pattern method, developed at IHME) and found that this method outperformed another common verbal autopsy analytical method (physician-coded verbal autopsy, or PCVA).
Global
Malaria caused over 1.2 million deaths worldwide in 2010, twice the number found in the most recent comprehensive study of the disease. While malaria is traditionally considered a childhood disease, this study shows that there is a significant disease burden in adults.
For policymaking, planning, and advocacy, decision-makers need to know how funding to developing countries for health improvement changed in the wake of the global financial crisis. According to IHME researchers, development assistance for health (DAH) continued to grow in 2011, but the rate of growth was low.
The number of cases and deaths from breast and cervical cancer are rising in most countries, especially in the developing world where more women are dying at younger ages, according to a new study.
Children who live in households that own at least one insecticide-treated mosquito net (ITN), also known as bed nets, are less likely to be infected with malaria and less likely to die from the disease, according to new study.
The creation of the first strictly defined gold standard database of diagnoses for causes of death will help strengthen verbal autopsy (VA) methods in low-resource settings, according to a study published by a global group of researchers, the Population Health Metrics Research Consortium (PHMRC), which includes researchers from IHME.
The Tariff method, an easy-to-use tool developed by researchers at IHME for turning verbal autopsy (VA) results into meaningful cause of death data for health workers and policymakers, is capable of outperforming the more costly physician-certified verbal autopsy (PCVA) approach in most cases, according to new research by IHME as part of the Population Health Metrics Research Consortium (PHMRC).
Physician certification is the most widely used method for interpreting verbal autopsy (VA), yet physicians correctly determine cause of death less than half of the time, according to new research by IHME and the University of Queensland as part of the Population Health Metrics Research Consortium (PHMRC).
The King and Lu (KL) method for directly estimating the fraction of all deaths in a population due to a given cause has been used to interpret verbal autopsies (VAs) in areas with incomplete vital registration systems.
InterVA, an automated and widely available tool for assigning cause of death using verbal autopsies (VAs), does not perform as well as other methods, such as physician-certified verbal autopsy (PCVA) and the Simplified Symptom Pattern (SSP) method, according to a study published by researchers at IHME and the University of Queensland, as part of the Population Health Metrics Research Consortium (PHMRC).
New research from IHME, the Department of Health Services at the University of Washington, and the University of Queensland as part of the Population Health Metrics Research Consortium (PHMRC) shows that the Simplified Symptom Pattern (SSP) method can be used to accurately interpret verbal autopsies (VAs).
The global economic crisis that unfolded in 2008 raised serious concerns about developing countries ability to meet global health targets and commitments to fund health programs. The commentary points out how the uncertainty underscores the importance of tracking spending on global health to ensure resources are directed efficiently to the world's most pressing health issues.
New research by IHME demonstrates how the quality of mortality data can be improved by redistributing deaths attributed to heart failure to their underlying causes of death according to statistically derived redistribution proportions.
A substantial proportion of individuals with diabetes remain undiagnosed and untreated, in both developed and developing countries, according to a study by IHME researchers and collaborators.
New research shows that global systolic blood pressure (SBP) has decreased slightly since 1980, but trends varied significantly across regions and countries.
Researchers have found wide variability among countries’ efforts to control high cholesterol with medication. Many people in these countries are not aware of their high cholesterol, which significantly increases the risk of heart attack and stroke.
Between 1970 and 2009, women of reproductive age worldwide have doubled the average number of years of education they have been able to attain, and this increase is estimated to be responsible for lowering the mortality rate in children by more than half, according to a study by IHME researchers.
Bed net distribution and use has expanded rapidly across Africa, especially in countries that have received significant health aid for malaria prevention efforts, research shows. The study makes use of an innovative statistical tool that could have broader application in other public health settings.
Mortality in children younger than 5 years is falling in every region of the world, dropping from 11.9 million deaths in 1990 to 7.7 million deaths in 2010, according to research by IHME. These figures represent a 35% reduction in under-5 mortality within 10 years, a rate of decline that was faster than expected.
Valid, reliable, and comparable assessments of trends in causes of death are limited by a number of factors.
The most comprehensive assessment to date of global adult mortality shows how health disparities among countries and between men and women are widening around the world.
Public financing of health by domestic governments nearly doubled between 1995 and 2006, according to IHME research. The study also analyzes the effect of development assistance for health, gross domestic product, government size, debt relief, and HIV prevalence on government health spending from domestic sources.
A novel analytical technique shows that more adults are dying between the ages of 15 and 60 in developing countries than previously thought, according to new research. Additionally, the new techniques provide a tool for directly measuring the impact of HIV instead of relying solely on theoretical models.
Research shows that new analytical methods can measure child mortality more accurately and less expensively, enabling policymakers to respond more quickly to pressing public health concerns. The study shows how these new methods can be used to evaluate mortality trends in specific regions, revealing health disparities.
Novel techniques can make better use of incomplete vital registration systems for population health studies, according to new research. The study describes an approach to check the completeness and accuracy of databases that compile information from death certificates.
Despite previous estimates of maternal mortality that showed little progress, this study, reveals that maternal deaths fell from more than 500,000 annually to fewer than 350,000 over the past 30 years.
Funding for health in developing countries quadrupled from $5.6 billion in 1990 to $21.8 billion in 2007, with private citizens, private foundations, and non-governmental organizations contributing an increasingly larger percentage of global health funding, research shows.
A patient’s satisfaction with the health care system depends more on factors external to the system than the patient’s actual health care experience, research shows.
The financial burden of out-of-pocket health spending is hampered by inconsistent survey methods, research shows.
Research conducted at IHME examines the number of children receiving diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis (DTP3) immunizations in 193 countries from 1986 to 2006.
War causes more deaths than previously estimated, according by researchers at IHME and Harvard Medical School.
Cervical cancer is a leading cause of mortality worldwide, and research shows that effective coverage of cervical cancer screening is lacking, particularly in developing countries.
The impact of the adoption of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) DOTS (directly observed therapy, short-course) tuberculosis control strategy in 187 WHO member states has been investigated using a novel approach.
Treatment of individuals in low-income and middle-income countries at high risk for cardiovascular disease with a preventive multidrug regimen could prevent almost a fifth of all deaths from cardiovascular disease, research shows.
Research shows that for the world as a whole, there has been little improvement in the reduction of child mortality within the last three decades.
Projects
IHME is evaluating the effectiveness of malaria interventions in two countries by analyzing their effect on child mortality and producing estimates at the national and local levels.
This project will explore disparities in chronic disease among US communities by designing a cost-effective and easily scalable data collection system to track such diseases and their accompanying risk factors using multiple data sources.
The goal of the PHMRC Mexico Study was to offer better instruments and methods to countries for measuring population health where cause of death coding and information on disease prevalence is incomplete or inadequate. As part of the study, IHME pioneered new ways to collect cause of death information through verbal autopsies.
IHME is measuring effective coverage in all Washington state counties and conducting one of the largest health surveys ever launched in a local population, work that will provide a model for other states.
The ABCE project aims to identify impediments to cost-effective, equitable access to health systems and provide policy and strategy options to countries for improving equity in health. The project will include more than a dozen countries.
The goal of DCPN is to improve how health resources are allocated in countries by producing estimates of the costs and cost effectiveness of interventions and health service delivery platforms.
The GBD 2010 Study will produce new estimates measuring the impact of hundreds of diseases, injuries, and risk factors in 21 regions around the world over two decades. The study is being carried out in collaboration with more than 800 researchers and includes more than 220 conditions and injuries and more than 40 risk factors.
To provide critical information for planning government facilities, policies, and interventions, IHME is working with collaborators in four countries to improve the understanding of leading causes of death in areas with poor or nonexistent vital registration systems.
IHME, working in close collaboration with research organizations in four countries, is developing methods to measure mortality, causes of death, and incidence of major illnesses where data are incomplete.
IHME, in collaboration with the Inter-American Development Bank, is measuring effective intervention coverage and health systems performance in southern Mexico and Central America.
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