EDITORIAL
COPD mortality statistics
Lies, damned lies and mortality statistics?
Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
Dr A L Hansell
Wellcome Intermediate Clinical Fellow, Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, Imperial College London (St Mary’s Campus), London W2 1PG, UK; a.hansell@imperial.ac.uk
Having confidence in COPD mortality data
Keywords: chronic obstructive pulmonary disease; epidemiology; mortality; multiple cause analysis
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) was the sixth leading cause of death worldwide in 1990 and will rise to the third leading cause by 2020.1,2 These findings from the Global Burden of Disease Study form the starting point for a wide range of recent articles about COPD. However, when trying to interpret mortality statistics and other routine sources of data such as hospital admissions, it can be hard to avoid thinking of the quotation "lies, damned lies, and statistics", attributed variably to Mark Twain or Benjamin Disraeli. In this issue of Thorax, data presented by Fuhrman et al3 show that COPD mortality in France in 2000–2 fell by around 40% compared with 1998–9 following a change from International Classification of Diseases coding version 9 (ICD-9) to ICD-10. In contrast, an increase in mortality of around 10% was seen when moving from ICD-9 to ICD-10
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This article has been cited by other articles:
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Rudolf, M.
(2007). COPD and death: what exactly is the relationship?. Thorax
62: 378-379
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