SPECIFIC FEATURES OF THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CONTINUOUS CAUSE-SPECIFIC MORTALITY TIME-SERIES FOR RUSSIA

Abstract

This article describes the experience in applying the method by F Meslé and J. Vallin to reconstruct the coherent series of death counts by causes of death in Russia, along with some methodological problems the author faced during its realization. The transition to ICD-10 in 1999 in Russia caused incomparability of cause-specific death counts coded before and after 1999. To overcome this problem and be able to analyze trends in mortality by cause for a long period of time, death counts by causes of death should be recalculated so that they are represented in the same classification. The method proposed by F. Meslé and J. Vallin in 1988 is the most commonly used method to perform such recalculation. But while applying this method for Russian data, the author found that transition to ICD-10 in Russia was not instantaneous. In several regions during the first years after the transition, the coding was still performed in accordance with the previous - Soviet - classification of causes of death, while real transition to ICD-10 was made 1-3 years later. Due to this delay the method by F. Meslé and J. Vallin could not be applied for national mortality data directly. Instead, the cause-specific series had to be reconstructed separately for a number of different territories. As a result of the completed reconstruction, for the first time since 1956, were obtained coherent cause-specific continuous data series coded in accordance with the brief Russian nomenclature based on ICD-10.