Home · ENT Burden Atlas

What this is

The ENT Burden Atlas presents a preregistered census of how research attention in otolaryngology (ear, nose and throat medicine) has aligned with disease burden over 30 years. Publications were counted in Europe PMC for 14 disease areas (1995–2024; 392,456 retrievable records); for the seven areas with a matched Global Burden of Disease (GBD) 2023 cause, output is set against DALY burden (1995–2023). Four measurement layers are reported on one scale: publication-share dynamics, the attention–burden ratio (ABR), the geographic distance between burden and research centroids, and a rule-based decoupling typology. The design was registered before the record-level data were pulled (OSF registration, DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/NUC4B).

26,544 → 128,117

Publications in the 14-area pool per five-year period, 1995–99 → 2020–24

32.1% → 44.6%

Combined pool share of the five head-and-neck cancers

log2 ABR −1.05 → −1.47

Hearing loss: 72.7% of pooled DALYs vs 26.3% of pooled publications (ABR 0.36 in 2020–24) — the deepest, still-widening deficit

7.9% → 39.8%

Low- and middle-income country share of first authors (all pooled areas); excluding China 5.4% → 17.9%

Headline findings

Shares rotated towards oncology. The five head-and-neck cancers jointly rose from 32.1% to 44.6% of the pool; laryngeal cancer moved against its own group (3.2% → 1.4%).
Otitis media shrank in share, not in output. Its share fell from 8.4% to 2.9% while its five-year output grew from 2,229 to 3,706 papers — a denominator effect.
Hearing loss is the central level finding. It carries 72.7% of the seven-cause DALY pool against 26.3% of the same pool's publications, and the gap widened over 30 years (log2 ABR −1.05 → −1.47).
Geography converged in direction, not in level. The burden–research centroid distance fell for all seven burden-tier causes (−39% to −80%), yet last-period distances remain 1,102–5,242 km.
Typology: otitis media is resolution-dilution (a relative share dilution — absolute DALYs rose for all seven causes); nasopharyngeal and oral cancer are technology-ignited under all three threshold sets; hearing loss is constant in dynamics at a deeply negative level (ABR 0.36); laryngeal, other pharyngeal and thyroid cancer are reported as unclassified, not forced into a type.

CRS/polyps. Terminology caveat: under a pre-frozen backup query built only from modern post-consensus terms, the CRS share change reverses (+251.0% instead of −26.6%). The apparent decline is read as terminology migration, not as a change in research volume, and is not carried as a headline conclusion.

How to cite and reuse

Preregistration: doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/NUC4B · Frozen data and code: Zenodo, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.24157110 · Production code: GitHub repository · Canonical site: burden.erbihou.org

A manuscript reporting this census is in preparation for Scientometrics (it has not been published). The frozen tables on the Downloads page can be reused under the archive licence; the pipeline is specialty-agnostic and can be re-run for another specialty's disease pool.

Scope boundary: every quantity here describes the configuration of published research relative to modelled burden estimates. Nothing on this site ranks diseases by clinical importance or states how much research any disease should receive.