The inclusion criteria for each risk–outcome pair that we applied were: 1) the likely importance of a risk factor to disease burden or policy based on previous work; 2) availability of sufficient data and methods to enable estimation of exposure distributions by country for at least one of the study periods (1990 and 2010); 3) sufficient evidence for causal effects based on high-quality epidemiological studies in which the findings were unlikely to be caused by bias or chance, analogous to the criteria used for assessment of carcinogens with con vincing or probable evidence (panel). Sufficient data to estimate outcome-specific etiological effect sizes per unit of exposure were also needed; and 4) evidence to support generalisability of effect sizes to populations other than those included in the available epidemiological studies or satisfactory models for extrapolating them. Table 1 shows the risk–outcome pairs that were included in the final analysis, on the basis of these criteria.
