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IHME finds innovative way to assess death recordsIncomplete vital registration systems become goldmines of useful data using new techniques April 13, 2010–Researchers will be able to make better use of incomplete vital registration systems for population health studies by using new techniques from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington and collaborators at the University of Queensland and Harvard University. The new methods provide researchers a way to check the completeness and accuracy of databases that compile information from death certificates. The study, What Can We Conclude from Death Registration? Improved Methods for Evaluating Completeness, appears in the April 13, 2010, issue of the journal PLoS Medicine. Policymakers rely on accurate information about mortality patterns to set public health priorities. Most high-income countries generate this information through death registration systems that capture nearly every death in the country. However, in low-resource settings, including most African countries, less than 25% of deaths are officially recorded. To overcome this lack of data, researchers for years have used demographic methods known as death distribution methods (DDMs). These methods use the relative proportion of deaths in each age group for recorded deaths and the age distribution of the general population to estimate the number of deaths that have not been officially counted. The World Health Organization uses DDMs to monitor adult mortality in nearly 100 countries. Until IHME undertook this study, researchers had not compared the performance of the various types of DDMs commonly used. For the paper, IHME and its collaborators systematically evaluated the performance of 234 DDMs. They also used these DDMs to analyze death registration systems in six developing countries. From this analysis, the researchers identified the three DDMs that yielded the best estimates. The researchers recommend that all three DDMs be used to estimate the completeness of a death registration system. “If you run your estimates through all three of these methods, you can compare the results,” said Dr. Christopher Murray, Institute Director and lead author on the study. “Instead of ignoring all of the incomplete death registration data that are out there, researchers will now be able to analyze data using these methods and make better estimates as a result.” Full Citation: Murray CJL, Rajaratnam JK, Marcus J, Laakso T, Lopez AD. What Can We Conclude from Death Registration? Improved Methods for Evaluating Completeness. PLoS Medicine. 2010 Apr 13; 7(4):e1000262. *Software capable of displaying a PDF is required for viewing or printing this document. You may download a free copy of Adobe Reader from the Adobe website at http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html. |
