title: Computing exact excess death rates from a published mortality study.
abstract: We wish to estimate the associated excess death rate (EDR) or mortality ratio (MR) from a published study of persons with a given medical condition. This requires computation of the expected mortality in the study population. If age- and sex-specific person years of data are available, this task is straightforward. Most often, however, we have only descriptive statistics--percentage male, average and standard deviation of age--at the beginning of follow up. We show here how this limited information can be used to compute an exact EDR or other quantities of interest.
authors.affiliation: Life Expectancy Project, 1439 - 17th Ave, San Francisco, CA, USA. Shavelle@LifeExpectancy.com
authors.forename: Robert M
authors.initials: RM
authors.lastname: Shavelle
authors.forename: David J
authors.initials: DJ
authors.lastname: Strauss
authors.forename: David R
authors.initials: DR
authors.lastname: Paculdo
mesh_terms: D017677:Age Distribution; D004194:Disease; D005500:Follow-Up Studies; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009026:Mortality / Q000639:trends*; D011159:Population Surveillance; D014481:United States / Q000453:epidemiology