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Comparative Study
. 2014 Dec 17:14:1295.
doi: 10.1186/1471-2458-14-1295.

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

Ivana Kulhánová  1 , Gwenn Menvielle, Matthias Bopp, Carme Borrell, Patrick Deboosere, Terje A Eikemo, Rasmus Hoffmann, Mall Leinsalu, Pekka Martikainen, Enrique Regidor, Maica Rodríguez-Sanz, Jitka Rychtaříková, Bogdan Wojtyniak, Johan P Mackenbach
Affiliations
Comparative Study

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

Ivana Kulhánová et al. BMC Public Health. .

Abstract

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.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Share of ASMR from ill-defined conditions on all-cause ASMR (in %) by country and sex, 30–79 years.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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Pre-publication history
    1. The pre-publication history for this paper can be accessed here: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/14/1295/prepub

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