Socioeconomic differences in the use of ill-defined causes of death in 16 European countriesShow others and affiliations
2014 (English)In: BMC Public Health, E-ISSN 1471-2458, Vol. 14, article id 1295Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]
BACKGROUND: Cause-of-death data linked to information on socioeconomic position form one of the most important sources of information about health inequalities in many countries. The proportion of deaths from ill-defined conditions is one of the indicators of the quality of cause-of-death data. We investigated educational differences in the use of ill-defined causes of death in official mortality statistics.
METHODS: Using age-standardized mortality rates from 16 European countries, we calculated the proportion of all deaths in each educational group that were classified as due to "Symptoms, signs and ill-defined conditions". We tested if this proportion differed across educational groups using Chi-square tests.
RESULTS: The proportion of ill-defined causes of death was lower than 6.5% among men and 4.5% among women in all European countries, without any clear geographical pattern. This proportion statistically significantly differed by educational groups in several countries with in most cases a higher proportion among less than secondary educated people compared with tertiary educated people.
CONCLUSIONS: We found evidence for educational differences in the distribution of ill-defined causes of death. However, the differences between educational groups were small suggesting that socioeconomic inequalities in cause-specific mortality in Europe are not likely to be biased.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2014. Vol. 14, article id 1295
National Category
Public Health, Global Health, Social Medicine and Epidemiology
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:sh:diva-25781DOI: 10.1186/1471-2458-14-1295ISI: 000347988100001PubMedID: 25518912Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-84924322842OAI: oai:DiVA.org:sh-25781DiVA, id: diva2:778265
2015-01-092015-01-092023-08-28Bibliographically approved