public health utility of national causes-of-death data

From: 

Ruggiero, Mrs. Ana Lucia

Algorithms for enhancing public health utility of national causes-of-death data 

Naghavi M, Makela S, Foreman K, O'Brien J, Pourmalek F, Lozano R
Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, University of Washington

Population Health Metrics 2010, 8:9 (10 May 2010)

Available online PDF [44p.] at: http://www.pophealthmetrics.com/content/pdf/1478-7954-8-9.pdf

“…..Coverage and quality of cause-of-death (CoD) data varies across countries and time. Valid, reliable, and comparable assessments of trends in causes of death from even the best systems are limited by three problems:
a) changes in the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD) over time;
b) the use of tabulation lists where substantial detail on causes of death is lost; and
c) many deaths assigned to causes that cannot or should not be considered underlying causes of death, often called garbage codes (GCs).

The Global Burden of Disease Study and the World Health Organization have developed various methods to enhance comparability of CoD data.

In this study, we attempt to build on these approaches to enhance the utility of national cause-of-death data for public health analysis.