The terms developed and developing regions are used here rather than high- and low-to-middle income regions for consistency with the presentation of GBD 2010 estimates. The classification of countries into regions and regions into super-regions was based on both geographical proximity and epidemiological likeness in terms of cause of death patterns [1,11]. Materials published by Whiteford and collaborators[15] provide a list of all countries in each region and super-region. Where age-standardized DALY rates are presented, these were estimated using direct standardization to the global standard population that the WHO proposed in 2001 (http://www.who.int/healthinfo/paper31.pdf).
