Public health and healthcare

Disability

Disability: umbrella term for impairments, activity limitations, and participation restrictions; affects about 1.3 billion people (16% of humanity). Defined via medical, social, and biopsychosocial models, the WHO ICF, and the CRPD.

Disability Insurance

Disability insurance is insurance that replaces part of a person's income when injury or illness prevents work, through private policies or programs like Social Security Disability Insurance.

Disability-adjusted life year

Disability-adjusted life year (DALY), the Global Burden of Disease metric: DALY = YLL + YLD, one lost year of healthy life; introduced 1993 World Development Report, simplified after GBD 2010.

Disease Management

Disease management, also called disease state management or chronic disease management, is coordinated healthcare for chronic conditions using guidelines, self-management support, and multidisciplinary teams; originated in 1990s US managed care, now evolved into population health management.

Disease Outbreaks

A disease outbreak is when cases exceed the expected baseline in an area, group, or period; larger spread is an epidemic, and a worldwide one is a pandemic.

Disease registry

Disease registry: an organized system collecting uniform records on cases of a disease or condition in a defined population, used for surveillance, research, and quality improvement; examples include SEER cancer registration, Danish national registries, and AHA Get With The Guidelines registries.

Disease risk score

A disease risk score (DRS) is an epidemiology confounder summary method that condenses many patient covariates into a single predicted probability of disease, serving as the prognostic analog of the propensity score.

Disease X

Disease X is a placeholder name the World Health Organization uses for a hypothetical unknown pathogen that could cause a serious international epidemic or pandemic.

Diseases and epidemics of the 19th century

Diseases and epidemics of the 19th century: cholera pandemics from 1817, yellow fever, smallpox, tuberculosis, and malaria; John Snow's 1854 Broad Street investigation, germ theory, and the first international sanitary agreements.

Distributional cost-effectiveness analysis

Distributional cost-effectiveness analysis (DCEA) is a health economic evaluation method, introduced in 2014, that estimates how an intervention's costs and health effects are distributed across social subgroups.

District Hospitals

District hospitals: government-controlled hospitals serving as the major health facility for a designated geographic area; first referral level between primary care clinics and regional or tertiary hospitals, providing generalist 24-hour care.

DMF index

The DMF index is a dental epidemiology measure counting permanent teeth that are decayed, missing, or filled; mean DMFT at age 12 is the WHO benchmark.

DMMETCOV19 trial

DMMETCOV19 (NCT04626089) was a withdrawn ClinicalTrials.gov trial of metformin glycinate by Laboratorios Silanes in hospitalized COVID-19 patients with metabolic syndrome or type 2 diabetes; its completed sister trial DMMETCOV19-2 (NCT04625985) reported faster viral clearance.

Oct 20, 2026

DO-RE-MI C-S trial

The DO-RE-MI C-S trial is a University of Calgary pilot randomized controlled trial testing whether pasteurized donor milk better preserves the gut microbiome of cesarean-born full-term infants than formula.

Oct 10, 2026

Donald A. Henderson

Donald A. Henderson (1928–2016) was an American physician who directed the WHO smallpox eradication program from 1966 to 1977, then served as dean at Johns Hopkins.

Donald A.B. Lindberg

Donald A.B. Lindberg (1933–2019) was an American physician and pathologist who led the U.S. National Library of Medicine for over 30 years, launching PubMed and MedlinePlus.

Donald E. Wilson

Donald E. Wilson is an American gastroenterologist and academic administrator, the thirtieth dean of the University of Maryland School of Medicine from 1991 to 2006.

Donald J. Galagan

Donald J. Galagan was an American dental public health leader who rose to Assistant Surgeon General in the U.S. Public Health Service and helped establish water fluoridation.

Donna Diers

Donna Kaye Diers (1938–2013) was an American nurse, researcher, and educator who spent over 40 years at Yale School of Nursing, serving as its sixth dean.

Donnell D. Etzwiler

Donnell D. Etzwiler (1927–2003) was an American pediatric endocrinologist who founded the International Diabetes Center in Minneapolis and pioneered the patient-centered team approach to diabetes care.

Donor Selection

Donor selection, also called donor eligibility determination, is the screening and testing of blood, cell, tissue, and organ donors for transmissible disease and health risks, governed by FDA 21 CFR 1271, WHO blood guidelines, and OPTN policies.

Doris R. Schwartz

Doris R. Schwartz (1915–1999) was an American nursing pioneer in public health and aging, a Cornell faculty member for twenty-nine years and a Charter Fellow of the National Academy of Nursing.

Dose-escalation study

A dose-escalation study is a phase I clinical trial design giving sequentially increasing doses to small cohorts to characterize safety and select a dose for later development.

Dose-finding study

A dose-finding study is a clinical trial design that selects a treatment dose by evaluating safety, tolerability, and efficacy across dose levels, mainly in early-phase trials.

Dose-ranging study

A dose-ranging study is a clinical trial that gives participants several dose levels of a drug to characterize the dose-response relationship and select doses for later testing.

Dose–response study

A dose–response study examines how the risk of a health outcome changes as exposure or dose increases, used to judge whether an association is causal and to set regulatory exposure limits.

Double-dummy technique

The double-dummy technique is a blinding method for randomized trials where treatments differ in appearance, so each participant takes an active drug and a matching placebo.

DPPOS trial

DPPOS, the Diabetes Prevention Program Outcomes Study, is the long-term follow-up since 2002 of the US trial that tested lifestyle change and metformin for preventing type 2 diabetes.