Automated comparison of last hospital main diagnosis and underlying cause of death ICD10 codes, France, 2008-2009.

Background: In the age of big data in healthcare, automated comparison of medical diagnoses in large scale databases is a key issue. Our objectives were: 1) to formally define and identify cases of independence between last hospitalization main diagnosis (MD) and death registry underlying cause of death (UCD) for deceased subjects hospitalized in their last year of life; 2) to study their distribution according to socio-demographic and medico-administrative variables; 3) to discuss the interest of this method in the specific context of hospital quality of care assessment.

Methods: 1) Elaboration of an algorithm comparing MD and UCD, relying on Iris, a coding system based on international standards.

Quality comparison of electronic versus paper death certificates in France, 2010.

Background: Electronic death certification was established in France in 2007. A methodology based on intrinsic characteristics of death certificates was designed to compare the quality of electronic versus paper death certificates.

Methods: All death certificates from the 2010 French mortality database were included.

Trends in death attributed to heart failure over the past two decades in Europe.

Aims: Little is known regarding temporal trends in mortality attributed to heart failure (HF) from a population perspective. The aim of this study was to assess the mortality related to HF as an underlying cause during the last 20 years in seven European countries.

Methods And Results: The number of deaths with HF as the underlying cause was collected in seven European states: Germany, Greece, England and Wales, Spain, France, Finland, and Sweden from 1987 to 2008.

Cause-specific mortality time series analysis: a general method to detect and correct for abrupt data production changes.

Background: Monitoring the time course of mortality by cause is a key public health issue. However, several mortality data production changes may affect cause-specific time trends, thus altering the interpretation. This paper proposes a statistical method that detects abrupt changes ("jumps") and estimates correction factors that may be used for further analysis.

Mortality trends in systemic sclerosis in France and USA, 1980-1998: an age-period-cohort analysis.

We compared trends of Systemic Sclerosis (SS) mortality in France and the USA over the period 1980-1998 and used an Age-Period-Cohort (APC) model to adjust on the age at death of SS patients. All deaths coded with SS as an underlying primary or secondary cause in the national French and US mortality databases from 1980 to 1998 were included in the analysis. SS age-standardized mortality rates increased from 7.

Do we really know the cause of death of the very old? Comparison between official mortality statistics and cohort study classification.

Causes of death of 625 subjects who died during the 4-year follow-up of a large population-based elderly cohort (Three-City study) were independently classified by the study adjudication committee and the national mortality register. The former used all available data about the cause of death (hospital records, medical data obtained from family physicians or specialists, and proxy interviews) and the latter used internationally standardized recommendations for processing death certificate data. Comparison showed a moderate overall agreement for underlying cause of death between the study adjudication committee and the national register (kappa = 0.

The impact of major heat waves on all-cause and cause-specific mortality in France from 1971 to 2003.

Objectives: The aim of the study was to identify the major heat waves (HW) that occurred in France from 1971 to 2003 and describe their impact on all-cause and cause-specific mortality.

Methods: Heat waves were defined as periods of at least three consecutive days when the maximum and the minimum temperature, averaged over the whole France, were simultaneously greater than their respective 95th percentile. The underlying causes of death were regrouped into 18 categories.