Research Project
Full description National mortality statistics are based on a single underlying cause of death. This practice does not adequately represent the impact of the range of conditions experienced in an ageing population in which multimorbidity is common. We propose a new method for calculating the percentages of deaths attributed to different causes that takes account of the patterns of associations among underlying and contributing causes of death. It is driven by the data and unlike previously proposed methods does not rely on arbitrary choices of weights which can over-emphasise the contribution of some causes of death.