[EQ] Who Needs Cause-of-Death Data - - Estimating population cause-specific mortality fractions from in-hospital mortality

 

Who Needs Cause-of-Death Data

 

Peter Byass is at the Umeå International School of Public Health, Umeå, Sweden and Immpact (The Initiative for Maternal Mortality Programme Assessment), University of Aberdeen, Scotland

PLoS Med 4(11): e333 doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0040333

 

Available online at: http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.0040333

 

“….More than half of the world's deaths pass by undocumented as to cause [1]. Whilst the appropriate focus of health services may well be the care of the living, consistent and reliable cause-of-death data also constitute a crucial and major resource for health planning and prioritisation, and their lack in many settings is a major concern. Two new papers from Christopher Murray and colleagues in this issue of PLoS Medicine [2,3] report important methodological advances which should go some way towards filling these data gaps….”

 

This Perspective discusses the following new studies published in PLoS Medicine:

 

Estimating population cause-specific mortality fractions from in-hospital mortality: Validation of a new method.

Murray CJL, Lopez AD, Barofsky JT, Bryson-Cahn C, Lozano R (2007)

PLoS Med 4(11): e326. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0040326
Working in Mexico and using vital registration data, Chris Murray and colleagues achieved encouraging results with a new method to estimate population cause-specific mortality fractions.”

 

URL: http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.0040326

“……Cause-of-death data for many developing countries are not available. Information on deaths in hospital by cause is available in many low- and middle-income countries but is not a representative sample of deaths in the population. We propose a method to estimate population cause-specific mortality fractions (CSMFs) using data already collected in many middle-income and some low-income developing nations, yet rarely used: in-hospital death records…..

 

Validation of the symptom pattern method for analyzing verbal autopsy data

Murray CJL, Lopez AD, Feehan DM, Peter ST, Yang G (2007)
PLoS Med 4(11): e 327. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0040327
Chris Murray and colleagues propose and, using data from China, validate a new strategy for analyzing verbal autopsy data that combines the advantages of previous methods.

URL: http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.0040327

 

“…..Cause of death data are a critical input to formulating good public health policy. In the absence of reliable vital registration data, information collected after death from household members, called verbal autopsy (VA), is commonly used to study causes of death. VA data are usually analyzed by physician-coded verbal autopsy (PCVA). PCVA is expensive and its comparability across regions is questionable. Nearly all validation studies of PCVA have allowed physicians access to information collected from the household members' recall of medical records or contact with health services, thus exaggerating accuracy of PCVA in communities where few deaths had any interaction with the health system. In this study we develop and validate a statistical strategy for analyzing VA data that overcomes the limitations of PCVA….”

 

 

 

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