The current Mortality and Population Data System (MPDS) database contains the cause of death data and population data from 1950 to 2001, and it was designed to provide data for public health related studies. The cause of death data in the MPDS are provided by the National Center for Health Statistics and are updated annually as new cause of death data from NCHS are released. Since the actual annual population data is not available, the intercensal population figures have to be estimated based on the census population data. The population figures used in the MPDS were estimated by using year-based linear interpolations and extrapolations at the county level, while the census bureau used the cohort-component method to estimate the population. The purpose of this thesis is to compare these two population estimates using two approaches, 1) determine if there are any important differences between them, and 2) evaluate the effect of the difference on the calculation of the mortality rates. The results showed that at national, state and county level, sex was a factor that contributes to the difference between the two populations, while other factors such as year, race, and age group did not affect the difference greatly. The difference between the two population estimates mainly comes from the difference between the female groups of the two populations. The effect of the difference on the calculation of the standardized mortality ratios (SMRs) was analyzed by using data from an occupational cohort study. The results from the analysis of the occupational cohort data showed that the significance of the SMRs for each cause of death was not different when using different rates from the two population estimates. The 95% confidence intervals for the SMRs for the major categories of cause of death overlap. The SMRs calculated with new and old population estimates as reference populations were not significantly different.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PITT/oai:PITTETD:etd-12102004-102651 |
| Date | 17 December 2004 |
| Creators | Sang, Weilian |
| Contributors | Gary M. Marsh, Ada Youk, Ravi Sharma |
| Publisher | University of Pittsburgh |
| Source Sets | University of Pittsburgh |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.pitt.edu/ETD/available/etd-12102004-102651/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Pittsburgh or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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