Determining Cause Of Death: Validation Of New Methods In Developing Countries

Main Category: Public Health
Article Date: 20 Nov 2007 - 17:00 PDT

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Two articles on mortality are published in next week's PLoS Medicine. In the first, Christopher Murray and colleagues achieved encouraging results from their use of vital registration data in Mexico with a new method to estimate population cause-specific mortality fractions. In the second article, Murray and colleagues propose and -- using data from China -- validate a new strategy for analyzing verbal autopsy data that combines the advantages of previous methods. A related perspective by Peter Byass (who was not involved in these two studies) discusses how these studies report important methodological advances in determining cause of death and why this is crucial for health planning and prioritization.

Citation: Murray CJL, Lopez AD, Barofsky JT, Bryson-Cahn C, Lozano R (2007) Estimating population cause-specific mortality fractions from in hospital mortality: Validation of a new method. PLoS Med 4(11): e326.
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Citation: Murray CJL, Lopez AD, Feehan DM, Peter ST, Yang G (2007) Validation of the symptom pattern method for analyzing verbal autopsy data. PLoS Med 4(11): e 327.
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Related PLoS Medicine Perspective:

Citation: Byass P (2007) Who needs cause-of-death data? PLoS Med 4(11): e333.
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