Articles: mortality.
-
The authors examined causes of death contributing to the relatively high mortality of Danish women born 1915-45, and evaluated the impact of smoking related causes of death. ⋯ The results indicate a high smoking prevalence to be the main explanation behind the relatively low life expectancy of Danish women born 1915-45.
-
[corrected] In a previous article, it was demonstrated that use of mean age to enter a life table to obtain a mean expected mortality rate of a cohort with a wide age range invariably underestimates the true mean expected mortality rate, q'. This is due to the bias introduced by the average 10% annual increase in q' in the approximate age range of 45 to 90 years (rates in the population life table, ages 0-109 years were analyzed to illustrate this). The magnitude of the error was demonstrated in various examples. All of these data were limited to the first year of FU (follow-up) duration. In this article, we analyze progression of mean age, x, and mean expected mortality rate, q', with FU duration in cohorts with all ages combined. When the age range is only 5 or 10 years, the mean age of the survivors does increase very nearly a full year with each year of FU duration. ⋯ Progression of mean q' is erratic and unpredictable, because annual mean age of survivors is highly dependent on the proportion of younger patients in the cohort being followed. If the proportion of patients under age 45 years is high enough, both mean age and mean q' may show an initial decrease from the values found in the year of entry, because, even though each survivor is a year older, the progression of mean age is so heavily biased by the slower progression of q' at the younger than at the older ages. However, with the SEER database, if annual expected survival rates are converted to annual expected mortality rates, the derivation of mean expected mortality rate, q' is accurate, regardless of the width of the age range in the cohort selected and being analyzed. The user of the SEER database is warned that the expected cumulative survival rate, P', is derived in the SEER survival tables on the basis of the first-year age distribution, not on the basis of the changing age distribution that is actuarially observed.