Prevalence of life-threatening conditions in children.

Objective: We estimated the prevalence of children with life-threatening conditions (LTC) cared for in the military health system (MHS) in response to a Congressional inquiry and to inform program planning.

Methods: We developed a case definition of LTC, using the concept ''death trajectory''(1,2) to define our cases. We conducted an unduplicated count of children with LTC in the MHS database during FY 2001/FY 2002 using selected ICD-9 codes based on our case definition.