Compare methods

	Years of Life Lost	Life Table
Field	Demography	Demography
Family	Process / pipeline	Survival analysis
Year of origin	1994	1984
Originator	Premature-mortality measure; standardized form by Christopher Murray (Global Burden of Disease)	Demographic/actuarial tradition; Chiang
Type	Burden-of-disease measure of life-years lost to early death	Age-structured mortality estimator
Seminal source	Murray, C. J. L. (1994). Quantifying the burden of disease: the technical basis for disability-adjusted life years. Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 72(3), 429–445.	Chiang, C. L. (1984). The Life Table and Its Applications. Robert E. Krieger Publishing. ISBN: 978-0-89874-565-2
Aliases	YLL, Years of Potential Life Lost, Premature Mortality Years Lost	Mortality Table, Actuarial Table, Survival Table, Yaşam Tablosu
Related	4	3
Summary	Years of life lost (YLL) measures the burden of premature mortality by counting, for every death, how many additional years the person could have expected to live had they survived to a reference life expectancy. Summed over all deaths, YLL turns a count of deaths into a count of lost life-years, so that deaths at young ages weigh far more heavily than deaths in old age. It is the mortality half of the disability-adjusted life year (DALY) and a core metric of the Global Burden of Disease studies, letting analysts rank diseases and injuries by how much potential life they destroy rather than merely by how many people they kill.	A life table is a systematic, age-structured summary of the mortality experience of a population. It traces a hypothetical cohort of births — conventionally 100,000 — through successive age intervals, recording how many survive, how many die, and how many person-years are lived at each interval. The method was formalized in its modern probabilistic form by Chiang (1984), synthesizing centuries of actuarial and demographic practice into a rigorous statistical framework applicable to human and biological populations alike.