Public health utility of cause of death data: applying empirical algorithms to improve data quality.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Accurate, comprehensive, cause-specific mortality estimates are crucial for informing public health decision making worldwide. Incorrectly or vaguely assigned deaths, defined as garbage-coded deaths, mask the true cause distribution. The Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study has developed methods to create comparable, timely, cause-specific mortality estimates; an impactful data processing method is the reallocation of garbage-coded deaths to a plausible underlying cause of death. We identify the pattern of garbage-coded deaths in the world and present the methods used to determine their redistribution to generate more plausible cause of death assignments.

Methods

We describe the methods developed for the GBD 2019 study and subsequent iterations to redistribute gar

SUBMITTER: Johnson SC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8170729 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature