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In real terms, the
morbid and mortal components used in the Q-index are "foreign" to
each other. In the Miller’s Q-index, the shortening of life by one
day due to premature death is arbitrarily equated to one bed-day in the
hospital, or to three outpatient visits. This arbitrariness is the price for
having a simple, one-dimensional, easy-to-interpret index which can be used
as the first approximation of the relative impact of the risk-factor of
interest on the population health.
To complement the use of the one-dimensional measurement of the health
risk impact, this study represents Q-index as well as the other
indexes introduced in this study as a vector with two components describing
separately mortal and morbid experience associated with the risk
factor or with the health intervention. In the vector representation, the
mortal and morbid components, respectively, are JDTH
and JDIS.
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