Improving Validity of Cause of Death on Death Certificates

Hoffman, Ryan; Venugopalan, Janani; Li, Qu; Wu, Haiyuan; Wang, May D.

doi:10.1145/3233547.3233581

Cited by 16 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…However, the amount of information that is contained in this registry is uneven. Systematic patterns in incomplete PLOS ONE data, particularly across racial/ethnic groups, have been previously documented in mortality records [26,[36][37][38] and population health surveillance efforts (e.g., COVID infection and mortality [39]) The CDC and state NVDRS programs should examine why the information bias identified in this study occurs, and work with local, state, and federal stakeholders, as well as external researchers, to address it. Potential means of addressing the issues identified in this existing archive include the creation of sampling weights that account for differential selection (i.e., missingness) of having a narrative, and collaborating with data users to create trainings for researchers who want to use the narrative data to ensure their analytic approach minimizes potential biases.…”

Section: Plos Onementioning

confidence: 84%

“…While these are both written by NVDRS staff and therefore should have similar information, we examined each type separately to assess PLOS ONE the degree to which any patterns we observe regarding decedent characteristics are similar across the two texts. If the patterns are similar, this may reflect features of the centralized NVDRS system or general limitations in the accuracy and completeness of mortality documentation (i.e., lack of access to specific records by NVDRS staff, incomplete death certificates) [26]. If the patterns differ, this may reflect characteristics of the source documents (e.g., toxicology reports, police reports) or reporting procedures.…”

Section: Data Source and Elementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Not discussed: Inequalities in narrative text data for suicide deaths in the National Violent Death Reporting System

et al. 2021

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Background The rate of suicide in the US has increased substantially in the past two decades, and new insights are needed to support prevention efforts. The National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS), the nation’s most comprehensive registry of suicide mortality, has qualitative text narratives that describe salient circumstances of these deaths. These texts have great potential for providing novel insights about suicide risk but may be subject to information bias. Objective To examine the relationship between decedent characteristics and the presence and length of NVDRS text narratives (separately for coroner/medical examiner (C/ME) and law enforcement (LE) reports) among 233,108 suicide and undetermined deaths from 2003–2017. Methods Generalized estimating equations (GEE) logistic and quasi-Poisson modeling was used to examine variation in the narratives (proportion of missing texts and character length of the non-missing texts, respectively) as a function of decedent age, sex, race/ethnicity, education, marital status, military history, and homeless status. Models adjusted for site, year, location of death, and autopsy status. Results The frequency of missing narratives was higher for LE vs. C/ME texts (19.8% vs. 5.2%). Decedent characteristics were not consistently associated with missing text across the two types of narratives (i.e., Black decedents were more likely to be missing the LE narrative but less likely to be missing the C/ME narrative relative to non-Hispanic whites). Conditional on having a narrative, C/ME were significantly longer than LE (822.44 vs. 780.68 characters). Decedents who were older, male, had less education and some racial/ethnic minority groups had shorter narratives (both C/ME and LE) than younger, female, more educated, and non-Hispanic white decedents. Conclusion Decedent characteristics are significantly related to the presence and length of narrative texts for suicide and undetermined deaths in the NVDRS. Findings can inform future research using these data to identify novel determinants of suicide mortality.

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Section: Plos Onementioning

confidence: 84%

Section: Data Source and Elementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Not discussed: Inequalities in narrative text data for suicide deaths in the National Violent Death Reporting System

et al. 2021

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“…First, death certificates, from which CDC WONDER estimates are derived, are known to include inaccurcies in race, ethnicity, and cause of death. 15,16 However, race and Hispanic origin has been found to be most accurate for non-Hispanic Black and White decedent’s death certificates, in that it more often matched self-reporting in US Census data. 17 Further, cause of death inaccuracies are most often within the ICD-10 code level, rather than in the ICD-10 grouping that we used.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Racism as a Leading Cause of Death: Measuring Excess Deaths in the US

Massey

Faust

Dorsey

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Background: Excess death for Black people compared with White people is a measure of health equity. We sought to determine the excess deaths under the age of 65 (<65) for Black people in the United States (US) over the most recent 20-year period. We also compared the excess deaths for Black people with a cause of death that is traditionally reported. Methods: We used the Multiple Cause of Death 1999-2019 dataset from the Center of Disease Control (CDC) WONDER to report age-adjusted mortality rates among non-Hispanic Black (Black) and non-Hispanic White (White) people and to calculate annual age-adjusted <65 excess deaths for Black people from 1999-2019. We measured the difference in mortality rates between Black and White people and the 20-year and 5-year trends using linear regression. We compared age-adjusted <65 excess deaths for Black people to the primary causes of death among <65 Black people in the US. Results: From 1999 to 2019, the age-adjusted mortality rate for Black men was 1,186 per 100,000 and for White men was 921 per 100,000, for a difference of 265 per 100,000. The age-adjusted mortality rate for Black women was 802 per 100,000 and for White women was 664 per 100,000, for a difference of 138 per 100,000. While the gap for men and women is less than it was in 1999, it has been increasing among men since 2014. These differences have led to many Black people dying before age 65. In 1999, there were 22,945 age-adjusted excess deaths among Black women <65 and in 2019 there were 14,444, deaths that would not have occurred had their risks been the same as those of White women. Among Black men, 38,882 age-adjusted excess <65 deaths occurred in 1999 and 25,850 in 2019. When compared to the top 5 causes of deaths among <65 Black people, death related to disparities would be the highest mortality rate among both <65 Black men and women. Comment: In the US, over the recent 20-year period, disparities in mortality rates resulted in between 61,827 excess deaths in 1999 and 40,294 excess deaths in 2019 among <65 Black people. The race-based disparity in the US was the leading cause of death among <65 Black people. Societal commitment and investment in eliminating disparities should be on par with those focused on other leading causes of death such as heart disease and cancer.

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“…Many scholars begin to advocate that we should pay attention to inference of the underlying cause-of-death, to establish a new inference model, to improve the efficiency of the inference of the cause-of-death, and to provide a better data basis for the study of the underlying cause-of-death [ 8 , 9 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Automatic Approach Designed for Inference of the Underlying Cause-of-Death of Citizens

Gao

et al. 2021

IJERPH

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It is very important to have a comprehensive understanding of the health status of a country’s population, which helps to develop corresponding public health policies. Correct inference of the underlying cause-of-death for citizens is essential to achieve a comprehensive understanding of the health status of a country’s population. Traditionally, this relies mainly on manual methods based on medical staff’s experiences, which require a lot of resources and is not very efficient. In this work, we present our efforts to construct an automatic method to perform inferences of the underlying causes-of-death for citizens. A sink algorithm is introduced, which could perform automatic inference of the underlying cause-of-death for citizens. The results show that our sink algorithm could generate a reasonable output and outperforms other stat-of-the-art algorithms. We believe it would be very useful to greatly enhance the efficiency of correct inferences of the underlying causes-of-death for citizens.

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Improving Validity of Cause of Death on Death Certificates

Cited by 16 publications

References 38 publications

Not discussed: Inequalities in narrative text data for suicide deaths in the National Violent Death Reporting System

Not discussed: Inequalities in narrative text data for suicide deaths in the National Violent Death Reporting System

Racism as a Leading Cause of Death: Measuring Excess Deaths in the US

An Automatic Approach Designed for Inference of the Underlying Cause-of-Death of Citizens

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