malignancy-leading cause of death?

[mjl1717]

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The CDC as of Jan. 2005 states that malignancy (across all age groups) is the leading cause of death.... I was always saying leading cause of death was Heart disease, cancer , stroke.. or am I just going crazy????

Any comments??

 

[kdburton]

The CDC as of Jan. 2005 states that malignancy (across all age groups) is the leading cause of death.... I was always saying leading cause of death was Heart disease, cancer , stroke.. or am I just going crazy????

Any comments??

I know that many cancer statisitics don't include skin cancers. Malignant melanoma has been increasing in incidence at an alarming rate in the last few decades, so if they include it in the "malignancy" number you're looking at then it is possible that cancer > heart disease as a cause of death. I could be totally wrong though

 

[yaah]

Probably depends on how you are classifying and grouping things.

Where does the CDC say this? If you look here http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/FASTATS/lcod.htm they say it is heart disease.

 

[mjl1717]

Probably depends on how you are classifying and grouping things.

Where does the CDC say this? If you look here http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/FASTATS/lcod.htm they say it is heart disease.

There thousands of ways to create confusion in this field.. I DONT want to do that.
I was looking at the reference for the score95.com questions and that is what they said, they mentioned the CDC.. they also mentioned that more women are smoking also which increase the incidence of lung CA. Its somewhat confusing..😕

 

[roja]

Depends on how you classify it.

Sepsis outranks MI. Or breast cancer. or colon cancer.

These numbers are relatively meaningless as they are made off of ICD9 codings and death certificate pronouncements, etc.

So, one doc may classify a death from PNA/sepsis in a cancer patient as Cancer, pna or sepsis.

If you added death from ALL cancers, it probably is number one. But is it dying from cancer, complications from cancer, infections from immunocomprimised states, etc et.


None of these things are easy to sort out.

 

[montessori2md]

What with this being the "digital age" and all, it would be nice if checking more than one box would become more popular on things like death certificates. You'd think it would help cut down on deaths, to accurately record the cause(s), and then use that for research.

 

[gro2001]

What with this being the "digital age" and all, it would be nice if checking more than one box would become more popular on things like death certificates. You'd think it would help cut down on deaths, to accurately record the cause(s), and then use that for research.

Except what the hell are you supposed to do with data that tells you that pt died from MI and lung cancer? I mean, ONE of them had to have killed him, which was the cause of death, which is the point of the death certificate. If one condition predisposed him to the other, thats an important part of medical history but not a matter for the death certificate (which is supposed to register cause of death only). Nobody thinks of adding "due to smoking" on a lung cancer death certificate or "because of a PBJ sandwhich" on a anaphylaxis death certificate.

Also, invariably there are going to be seemingly contradictory reports (MI, stroke, trauma, infection, cancer and congenital abnomality all checked) due to mistakes, confusion, etc. Woe be to you if you are the one having to figure out what really happened.