Mapping is a fundamental tool in assessing a disease's geographic distribution and severity across populations and periods. For mortality maps, the use of age adjustment allows for population comparisons without the confounding effects from differences in age structures. Mortality maps tend to use the direct age adjustment method for computing rates, where age-specific rates of the study populations are applied to the same standard population weights. However, the less often used indirect method of age adjustment, where a set of standard age-specific death rates are weighted to the actual age structure of the population, may be preferred for mapping outcomes associated with older age, yet still evident across other ages. Using 2000-2020 United States county-level sepsis mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data portal (CDC WONDER), this research explores the reliability of calculating accurate estimates of missing or censored mortality CDC data to create both direct and indirect age-adjusted mortality maps. Both direct and indirect maps were shown to be consistent with spatial clustering patterns, and the indirect age-adjusted map provided more stabilized rates for small population counties, often ignored due to missing or unreliable rates. Additionally, the calculated mortality rates were shown to have a high degree of similarity to the sourced CDC WONDER death rates. This research highlights the impacts of choice in age adjustment methods for mortality mapping, with an emphasis on indirect age adjustment, particularly for diseases with variability in age-dependent mortality rates.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:unt.edu/info:ark/67531/metadc2332654 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Crawford, Madeline Nicole |
| Contributors | Oppong, Joseph R., Tiwari, Chetan, Kang, Wei |
| Publisher | University of North Texas |
| Source Sets | University of North Texas |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | Text |
| Rights | Public, Crawford, Madeline Nicole, Copyright, Copyright is held by the author, unless otherwise noted. All rights Reserved. |
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