BACKGROUND:Heart failure is sometimes incorrectly listed as the underlying cause of death (UCD) on death certificates, thus compromising the accuracy and comparability of mortality statistics. Statistical redistribution of the UCD has been used to examine the effect of misclassification of the UCD attributed to heart failure, but sex- and race-specific redistribution of deaths on coronary heart disease (CHD) mortality in the United States has not been examined.METHODS:We used coarsened exact matching to infer the UCD of vital records with heart failure as the UCD from 1999 to 2010 for decedents 55years old and older from states encompassing regions under surveillance by the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) Study (Maryland, Minnesota, Mississippi, and North Carolina). Records with heart failure as the UCD were matched on decedent characteristics (five-year age groups, sex, race, education, year of death, and state) to records with heart failure listed among the multiple causes of death. Each heart failure death was then redistributed to plausible UCDs proportional to the frequency among matched records.RESULTS:After redistribution the proportion of deaths increased for CHD, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, diabetes, hypertensive heart disease, and cardiomyopathy, P<0.001. The percent increase in CHD mortality after redistribution was the highest in Mississippi (12%) and lowest in Maryland (1.6%), with variations by year, race, and sex. Redistribution proportions for CHD were similar to CHD death classification by a panel of expert reviewers in the ARIC study.CONCLUSIONS:Redistribution of ill-defined UCD would improve the accuracy and comparability of mortality statistics used to allocate public health resources and monitor mortality trends.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:arizona.edu/oai:arizona.openrepository.com:10150/610236 |
| Date | January 2014 |
| Creators | Snyder, Michelle, Love, Shelly-Ann, Sorlie, Paul, Rosamond, Wayne, Antini, Carmen, Metcalf, Patricia, Hardy, Shakia, Suchindran, Chirayath, Shahar, Eyal, Heiss, Gerardo |
| Contributors | Department of Epidemiology, Gillings School of Public Health, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 137 E. Franklin St., Suite 306, Chapel Hill, NC 27514, USA, The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), National Institutes of Health (NIH), Two Rockledge Center, Suite 10018, 6701 Rockledge Dr. MSC 7936, Bethesda, Maryland 20892, USA, Department of Epidemiology, School of Public Health, University of Chile, Independencia 939, Independencia, Santiago 8380453, Chile, Department of Statistics, University of Auckland, Private Bag 9201, Auckland 1142, New Zealand, Department of Biostatistics, Gillings School of Public Health, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 3103-A McGavran-Greenberg, 135 Dauer Drive, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA, Division of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health, The University of Arizona, 1295 N. Martin Ave, Tucson, AZ 85724, USA |
| Publisher | BioMed Central |
| Source Sets | University of Arizona |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Article |
| Rights | © 2014 Snyder et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0) |
| Relation | http://www.pophealthmetrics.com/content/12/1/10 |
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