Socioeconomic differences in the use of ill-defined causes of death in 16 European countries

BMC Public Health

Johan P Mackenbach⁴  Bogdan Wojtyniak⁶  Jitka Rychtaříková^1,11  Maica Rodríguez-Sanz²  Enrique Regidor³  Pekka Martikainen⁷  Mall Leinsalu⁵  Rasmus Hoffmann⁴  Terje A Eikemo⁸  Patrick Deboosere¹  Carme Borrell²  Matthias Bopp^1,10  Gwenn Menvielle⁹  Ivana Kulhánová⁴ 

[1] Department of Sociology, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium;Agència de Salut Pública de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain;Department of Preventive Medicine and Public Health, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain;Department of Public Health, Erasmus Medical Center, P.O. Box 2040, 3000 CA Rotterdam, The Netherlands;Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, National Institute for Health Development, Tallinn, Estonia;Department-Centre for Monitoring and Analyses of Population Health Status and Health Care System, National Institute of Public Health – National Institute of Hygiene, Warsaw, Poland;Department of Sociology, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland;Department of Sociology and Political Science, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway;Sorbonne Universités, UPMC Univ Paris 06, UMR_S 1136, Pierre Louis Institute of Epidemiology and Public Health, 75013 Paris, France;Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine, University of Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland;Department of Demography and Geodemography, Faculty of Science, Charles University in Prague, Prague, Czech Republic

关键词: Europe;    Data quality;    Ill-defined causes of death;    Education;    Mortality;   

Others  :  1091937
DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2458-14-1295

 received in 2014-07-16, accepted in 2014-12-08,  发布年份 2014

【 摘 要 】

Background

Cause-of-death data linked to information on socioeconomic position form one of the most important sources of information about health inequalities in many countries. The proportion of deaths from ill-defined conditions is one of the indicators of the quality of cause-of-death data. We investigated educational differences in the use of ill-defined causes of death in official mortality statistics.

Methods

Using age-standardized mortality rates from 16 European countries, we calculated the proportion of all deaths in each educational group that were classified as due to “Symptoms, signs and ill-defined conditions”. We tested if this proportion differed across educational groups using Chi-square tests.

Results

The proportion of ill-defined causes of death was lower than 6.5% among men and 4.5% among women in all European countries, without any clear geographical pattern. This proportion statistically significantly differed by educational groups in several countries with in most cases a higher proportion among less than secondary educated people compared with tertiary educated people.

Conclusions

We found evidence for educational differences in the distribution of ill-defined causes of death. However, the differences between educational groups were small suggesting that socioeconomic inequalities in cause-specific mortality in Europe are not likely to be biased.

【 授权许可】

   
2014 Kulhánová et al.; licensee BioMed Central.

【 图 表 】

Figure 1.

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