Eugene Rogot

Validity of demographic characteristics on the death certificate.

In a sample of the United States population from the Census Bureaus current Population Surveys, we compared demographic characteristics with those recorded on the death certificate for the 43,000 decedents in the samples followed from 1979 to 1985. Overall percentage agreements were: Sex 99.5, Race 99.4, Place of birth 99.4, Hispanic origin 98.7, and Veteran status 95.2. Relatively fewer American Indians and Asian/Pacific Islanders had death certificates that agreed with the baseline race (73.6% and 82.4%, respectively). The direction of disagreement suggests that current estimates of mortality rates for American Indians and Asian/Pacific Islanders are underestimated.

Probabilistic methods in matching census samples to the National Death Index

The National Death Index (NDI) of the National Center for Health Statistics is a powerful tool for identifying deaths in epidemiologic studies. The NDI will generate a list of possible matches for every input record according to the NDI matching criteria. The task of determining a true or correct match out of the list of possible matches becomes formidable when a large number of records are being investigated. In the National Longitudinal Mortality Study nearly one million Census records are being matched to the NDI, thus requiring an efficient and accurate method to screen out the false positive matches. In a pilot study to the larger mortality follow-up, Census Bureau files containing 226,000 person records were matched to the 1979 NDI. The results of this match were used to generate a probabilistic method to separate the possible matches into categories of true positives, false positives and those of questionable status requiring manual review of the Census record and the death certificate. Of the 5542 possible matches about one-third were ultimately determined to be true positives and two-thirds false positives. The probabilistic method was validated by replications on subsets of the data and promises to save considerable time in review of records in the large national study of mortality.

Survivorship and causes of death among the blind

Abstract A follow-up study of 11,732 persons first registered as legally blind in Massachusetts during the 20-year period 1940–1959, was conducted in order to determine survival rates, sight-restored rates and probabilities of dying from major causes of death for the blind. Blind persons experienced poorer survivorship than expected at all ages up to 75, with little if any difference apparent at ages 75 and over. Marked differences were noted for asges 25–64. Survival rates for persons with diabetes as the cause of blindness were extremely low in comparison with the general population. Diabetes and heart disease were the two causes of death among the blind that especially showed large excesses in mortality over the expected rates. Sight-restored rates were in general rather low. Throughout, findings were similar for males and females. Data were also compared with material in two previous studies. Limitations in the present study were discussed and further research suggested.