Abstract
In all countries, the study of long-term cause-specific mortality trends is hampered by discontinuities that distort statistical series as a result of periodic revisions to the classification of causes of death. In very rare cases, when an office responsible for cause-of-death statistics has produced classifications for one or two transition years under two different revisions (as in England and Wales when the Eighth Revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-8) was replaced by the Ninth Revision (ICD-9); see Meslé and Vallin 1993), observed transition coefficients can be used to reassign deaths classified under the old revision to the various items of the new revision. Unfortunately, in most cases, no such double classification is available, and a way has to be found to estimate the transition coefficients ex post.
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- 1.
1 In contrast, in ICD-9, for example, the content of the 5,600 items is described in detail in the analytical list. Further, an alphabetical index containing more than 60,000 terms and expressions makes it possible to assign every medical condition precisely to a single item (WHO 1977, 1978). However, Galina Gurova, statistician in charge of cause-of-death classifications at Goskomstat, provided us with two tables that summarize the 1965 items partly or fully included in each 1970 item, as well as the corresponding list of three-digit codes from ICD-8. For the transition from the 1970 Classification to the 1981 Classification, a similar – though less complete – document was published by Goskomstat (1981). These gave us our second table and provided us with the information necessary to create our first table.
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2 The first study, of the Soviet Union as a whole, (Meslé et al. 1992) covered only two revisions. The publication on Russia (Meslé et al. 1996) covered three, as does this study on Ukraine. Work in progress on the Baltic States covers four Soviet revisions plus ICD-9 and ICD-10 (recently adopted in those countries).
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3 Owing to changes during the process of establishing transition coefficients, when Russian fundamental associations were merged or subdivided, we arrived at a slightly different number of associations for Ukraine. For the transition from the 1965 to the 1970 Classification, there are 124 Ukrainian associations as against 132 for Russia. For the 1970/1981 transition, there are 138 associations for Ukraine, to Russia’s 137.
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4 The ten items for occupational accidents were ‘hidden causes’ (see Chap. 8). In order to produce statistics on these items to use here, we had to retrieve tables that had been kept secret for many years, separately from the basic tables.
References
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Meslé, F., Vallin, J. (2012). Reconstructing Series of Deaths by Cause with Constant Definitions. In: Mortality and Causes of Death in 20th-Century Ukraine. Demographic Research Monographs. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2433-4_9
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