Potential years of life lost – criterion for socio-economic assessment of premature mortality

Abstract

The article deals with the issues of assessing premature mortality using potential demographic methods, which allows taking into account not only the number of death events, but also the age of the deceased. This approach, applied by the authors to assessing the trends and structure of causes of death during the pandemic in Moscow and Russia, demonstrated an overestimation of the significance of causes specific to young ages. As part of the discussion, using the example of a comparative characteristic of potential life losses in the United States and other economically developed countries, it is shown how the factor of a younger mortality structure in the United States due to a pandemic caused significantly higher not only demographic, but also social losses. For citation: Ivanova AE, Semenova VG, Evdokushina GN, Kryukova IA, Potential years of life lost – criterion for socio-economic assessment of premature mortality. City Healthсare. 2022;3(4): 75–83 doi:10.47619/2713-2617.zm.2022.v.3i4; 75–83