General Trends in Mortality by Cause

Abstract

At the end of the reconstruction described in the previous chapter, we had sex-specific and age-specific deaths by cause, classified under the 177 items of the 1981 Soviet Classification, as amended in 1988, for every year from 1965 to 2004 – 4 years in addition to those initially described in the French edition of this book (Meslé and Vallin 2003). Two further years, 2005 and 2006, had to be added, since cause-of-death statistics for Ukraine were also available for these. However, from 2005, Ukraine adopted the tenth Revision of the International Classification of Diseases, at least in an abridged form with 240 items. Therefore, in order to make these 2 years consistent with the earlier ones, we would have had to reclassify the whole 1965–2004 series into the 240 ICD-10 items. Of course, a mere 2 years’ experience of the new classification was not enough to allow us to apply the method we used in the previous chapter in reconstructing the 1965–2004 series: the period covered by the new classification was too short to guarantee the validity of transition coefficients. Therefore we preferred to confine ourselves to provisional guarantees of more basic consistency for the groups of causes that had been used in analysing the results presented in the French edition, updated here for the English one. Consequently, Annex VI (on CD-ROM), which gives the annual sex-specific trend in the total number of deaths for each of the 177 items in the Soviet Classification, and Annex VIII, which gives the annual trend by 5-year age group (one table by sex and by item), relate only to the period 1965–2004; but they are supplemented by Annex VIIIa, which give the same trends for the years 2005 and 2006, for the 240 items defined according to ICD-10. It is from this set of results that cause-specific trends in mortality in Ukraine will be analysed in the following chapters. For comparative purposes, these trends will be systematically set against those in France and in Russia. The choice of these two countries is not accidental. Firstly, since this work on Ukraine is situated within the framework of an overarching project that is looking at all the republics of the former USSR in turn, it seemed to us essential to take the largest republic, Russia, as the reference point each time. Secondly, a point of comparison with Western countries was required and, from this angle, the work we had already done on causes of death in France offered the best guarantees of comparability. For Russia, we used the data already published (Meslé et al. 1996), supplemented for the years 1995–2005 (shortly available in the form of a database on the INED web site). For France, we took the much more detailed data derived from the reconstruction of homogeneous series in ICD-9 – which we have established elsewhere (Vallin and Meslé 1988, 1998) and regularly update on the INED web site – and reclassified them into the 177 Soviet Classification items.