Background: Cause-of-death statistics is widely used to monitor the health of a population.
I thought of how they struggle to survive against such long natural odds, such high background levels of death.
This is so even after adjustment for socioeconomic differences in the background risk of death by the use of life tables that are specific for each socioeconomic group.
For this reason, estimates of relative survival are often favoured; these estimates are intended to be independent of the background risk of death in a given population while also not relying on accurate cause of death information.
A narrative history of the circumstances surrounding the death was recorded from the respondent, and structured questions were asked regarding personal information, socio-economic background, place of death, treatment received for illness before death and symptoms of the deceased.
The background risk of death varies widely by age, sex and socioeconomic group; we used deprivation-specific life tables of all-cause mortality by single year of age at death, sex and calendar period (Cancer Research UK Cancer Survival Group, 2004).
This article provides a description of the population model PopMod, which is designed to simulate the health and mortality experience of an arbitrary population subjected to two interacting disease conditions as well as all other "background" causes of death and disability.
The survival of cancer patients in England and Wales increased for many of the common cancers during the 1970s and 1980s, but there were persistent socioeconomic inequalities in survival for most cancers in adults, even after correction for the higher background risk of death in more deprived groups (Coleman et al, 1999).
This post has been updated with more detail on the case and the background of the death penalty repeal law.
A sensitivity analysis, based on excess deaths from respiratory illness occurring above a background of expected deaths, generated slightly higher R estimates (1.4 1.5 for a generation interval of 3 days and 1.6 1.7 for a generation interval of 4 days).
