The impact of worldwide, national and sub-national severity distributions in Burden of Disease studies: A case study of cancers in Scotland.

Our findings illustrate a bias in point estimates of weighted-average DW created using worldwide severity distributions. This bias would have led to the misrepresentation of non-fatal estimates of the burden of individual cancers, and underestimated the scale of socioeconomic inequality in this non-fatal burden. This highlights the importance of not interpreting non-fatal estimates of burden of disease too precisely, especially for sub-national estimates and those comparing populations when relying on data inputs from other countries. It is essential to ensure that any estimates are based upon country-specific data as far as possible.