Two articles on mortality are published in next week’s PLoS Medicine. In the first, Christopher Murray and colleagues achieved encouraging results from their use of vital registration data in Mexico with a new method to estimate population cause-specific mortality fractions. In the second article, Murray and colleagues propose and -- using data from China -- validate a new strategy for analyzing verbal autopsy data that combines the advantages of previous methods. A related perspective by Peter Byass (who was not involved in these two studies) discusses how these studies report important methodological advances in determining cause of death and why this is crucial for health planning and prioritization.
Citation: Murray CJL, Lopez AD, Barofsky JT, Bryson-Cahn C, Lozano R (2007) Estimating population cause-specific mortality fractions from in hospital mortality: Validation of a new method. PLoS Med 4(11): e326.
IN YOUR ARTICLE, PLEASE LINK TO THIS URL, WHICH WILL PROVIDE ACCESS TO THE PUBLISHED PAPER: http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.0040326
PRESS-ONLY PREVIEW OF THE ARTICLE: http://www.plos.org/press/plme-04-11-murray-1.pdf
Citation: Murray CJL, Lopez AD, Feehan DM, Peter ST, Yang G (2007) Validation of the symptom pattern method for analyzing verbal autopsy data. PLoS Med 4(11): e 327.
IN YOUR ARTICLE, PLEASE LINK TO THIS URL, WHICH WILL PROVIDE ACCESS TO THE PUBLISHED PAPER: http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.0040327
PRESS-ONLY PREVIEW OF THE ARTICLE: http://www.plos.org/press/plme-04-11-murray-2.pdf
CONTACT:
Christopher Murray
University of Washington
Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation
1616 Eastlake Ave E
Suite 300
Seattle, WA 98102
United States of America
+1 206-770-1586
cjlm@u.washington.edu
Related PLoS Medicine Perspective:
Citation: Byass P (2007) Who needs cause-of-death data? PLoS Med 4(11): e333.
IN YOUR ARTICLE, PLEASE LINK TO THIS URL, WHICH WILL PROVIDE ACCESS TO THE PUBLISHED PAPER: http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.0040333 PRESS-ONLY PREVIEW OF THE ARTICLE: http://www.plos.org/press/plme-04-11-byass.pdf
Peter Byass
Umeå University
Epidemiology & Public Health Sciences
Umeå University
Umeå, 90185
Sweden
+46 90 785 33 45
peter.byass@epiph.umu.se
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