Impacts
This section presents two key measures of the impact of heart, stroke and vascular disease on the Australian population:
- estimates of the burden of cardiovascular disease, and
- estimates of expenditure on cardiovascular disease.
What is burden of disease?
Burden of disease is a measure of the years of healthy life lost from living with, or dying from disease and injury.
The measure used is the ‘disability adjusted life year’ (DALY). This combines health loss from living with illness and injury (non-fatal burden, or YLD) and dying prematurely (fatal burden, or YLL) to estimate total health loss (total burden, or DALY).
Burden of disease estimates seek to capture both the quantity and health-related quality of life, and to reflect the magnitude, severity and impact of disease and injury within a population. Burden of disease does not quantify the social or financial consequences of disease and injury.
Further information can be found in Australian Burden of Disease Study 2023.
What is expenditure on cardiovascular disease?
This section provides recent data on health care expenditure on CVD, with details by type of condition, health care service, age group, and sex.
It includes expenditure by the Australian Government, state, territory and local governments and the non-government sector (including private health insurance and individual contributions).
These estimates report direct, allocated and recurrent expenditure only. They do not account for the total amount spent on cardiovascular health.
Further information on how the estimates were derived is available from the Health system spending on disease and injury in Australia 2020-21 web report.