Juanita A Haagsma, Nicholas Graetz, Ian Bolliger, Mohsen Naghavi, Hideki Higashi, Erin C Mullany, Semaw Ferede Abera, Jerry Puthenpurakal Abraham, Koranteng Adofo, Ubai Alsharif, Emmanuel A Ameh, Walid Ammar, Carl Abelardo T Antonio, Lope H Barrero, Tolesa Bekele, Dipan Bose, Alexandra Brazinova, Ferrán Catalá-López, Lalit Dandona, Rakhi Dandona, Paul I Dargan, Diego De Leo, Louisa Degenhardt, Sarah Derrett, Samath D Dharmaratne, Tim R Driscoll, Leilei Duan, Sergey Petrovich Ermakov, Farshad Farzadfar, Valery L Feigin, Richard C Franklin, Belinda Gabbe, Richard A Gosselin, Nima Hafezi-Nejad, Randah Ribhi Hamadeh, Martha Hijar, Guoqing Hu, Sudha P Jayaraman, Guohong Jiang, Yousef Saleh Khader, Ejaz Ahmad Khan, Sanjay Krishnaswami, Chanda Kulkarni, Fiona E Lecky, Ricky Leung, Raimundas Lunevicius, Ronan Anthony Lyons, Marek Majdan, Amanda J Mason-Jones, Richard Matzopoulos, Peter A Meaney, Wubegzier Mekonnen, Ted R Miller, Charles N Mock, Rosana E Norman, Ricardo Orozco, Suzanne Polinder, Farshad Pourmalek, Vafa Rahimi-Movaghar, Amany Refaat, David Rojas-Rueda, Nobhojit Roy, David C Schwebel, Amira Shaheen, Saeid Shahraz, Vegard Skirbekk, Kjetil Søreide, Sergey Soshnikov, Dan J Stein, Bryan L Sykes, Karen M Tabb, Awoke Misganaw Temesgen, Eric Yeboah Tenkorang, Alice M Theadom, Bach Xuan Tran, Tommi J Vasankari, Monica S Vavilala, Vasiliy Victorovich Vlassov, Solomon Meseret Woldeyohannes, Paul Yip, Naohiro Yonemoto, Mustafa Z Younis, Chuanhua Yu, Christopher J L Murray, Theo Vos, Shivanthi Balalla, Michael R Phillips

The Global Burden of Diseases (GBD), Injuries, and Risk Factors study used the disability-adjusted life year (DALY) to quantify the burden of diseases, injuries, and risk factors. This paper provides an overview of injury estimates from the 2013 update of GBD, with detailed information on incidence, mortality, DALYs and rates of change from 1990 to 2013 for 26 causes of injury, globally, by region and by country. Injury mortality was estimated using the extensive GBD mortality database, corrections for ill-defined cause of death and the cause of death ensemble modelling tool. Morbidity estimation was based on inpatient and outpatient data sets, 26 cause-of-injury and 47 nature-of-injury categories, and seven follow-up studies with patient-reported long-term outcome measures. In 2013, 973 million (uncertainty interval (UI) 942 to 993) people sustained injuries that warranted some type of healthcare and 4.8 million (UI 4.5 to 5.1) people died from injuries. Between 1990 and 2013 the global age-standardised injury DALY rate decreased by 31% (UI 26% to 35%). The rate of decline in DALY rates was significant for 22 cause-of-injury categories, including all the major injuries. Injuries continue to be an important cause of morbidity and mortality in the developed and developing world. The decline in rates for almost all injuries is so prominent that it warrants a general statement that the world is becoming a safer place to live in. However, the patterns vary widely by cause, age, sex, region and time and there are still large improvements that need to be made.