Global Burden of Disease Study 2015 (GBD 2015) Reference Life Table

The Global Burden of Disease Study 2015 (GBD 2015), coordinated by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), estimated the burden of diseases, injuries, and risk factors at the global, regional, national, territorial, and, for a subset of countries, subnational level.

This reference life table is used in GBD to calculate Years of Life Lost (YLLs). It was constructed based on the lowest estimated age-specific mortality rates from all locations with populations over 5 million in the 2013 iteration of GBD. YLLs are computed by multiplying the number of estimated deaths by the reference life table’s life expectancy at age of death. The table includes estimates for the probability of death within an age range, the proportion of the hypothetical cohort still alive at age x, and life expectancy at age x for ages 0 to 110+ at five-year intervals.