Estimating Causes of Death Mortality

Alternative estimation strategies were used to model a subset of causes of death with unique epidemiology, large changes in reporting over time, or particularly limited data availability, including HIV/AIDS, malaria, chronic kidney disease, cirrhosis, liver cancer, meningitis, dementia, and atrial fibrillation. Alternative strategies included prevalence-based models, incidence and case fatality models, and sub-cause proportion models as described in appendix 1 (section 7). Mortality-incidence ratio models based on registry data were used to estimate mortality from 32 cancers (appendix 1 section 3.3). Negative-binomial models were used for eight causes of death with typically low death counts or causes that typically have no deaths in countries with a high Socio-demographic Index (SDI), including ascariasis, cystic echinococcosis, cysticercosis, diphtheria, iodine deficiency, other intestinal infectious diseases, schistosomiasis, and varicella and herpes zoster virus. Once underlying cause of death estimates and accompanying uncertainty were generated, these models were combined with the cause of death correction procedure (CoDCorrect) to establish estimates consistent with all-cause mortality levels for each age-sex-year location.