of Work: The purpose of this agreement was to support the collection and analysis of data on cause of death and characteristics of the last year of life in the planning of the 1992 Pretest and 1993 Main Survey of the 1993 National Mortality Followback Survey (NMFS), conducted by NCHS, CDC. This survey supplements information from death certificates in the vital statistics file with information on characteristics of the decedent. The pretest examined approximately 800 deaths of individuals aged 15 years and over who died in 1992. The main survey examined approximately 22,951 deaths of individuals aged 15 years and over who died in 1993. This includes 884 deaths to centenarians. A revised death certificate/informant(DC/I)file was delivered to the NIA/EDB by the NCHS in 1998 and has been extensively examined by EDB staff and the SYTEL computing support contractor. This file contains information keyed from the death certificate file and the informant interviews. Data from the final 1993 mortality file has been merged with the DC/I file and stripped of personal identifiers to form a working file. Post-stratification adjustment factors and non-response adjustments have been developed to form the final sample weights for each file record.Some additional problems remain with the revised data set, which will be reissued by NCHS in the fall of 1999. Meanwhile, data analyses have been initiated by EDB staff.At the Kentucky conference on Statistical Methods in Alzheimers Disease Research in 1998, EDB staff held discussions with a neurologist who had completed an analysis of data from the 1986 NMFS on dementia in the last year of life. A preliminary analysis of the 1993 data to explore dementia trends over the 7-year period between the two surveys has shown an almost three-fold increase in the recognition of dementia mortality both by physicians completing the death certificates and by informants responding for the decedents in the survey. Another preliminary analysis has shown a high rate of receipt of surgeries for the implantation of hip and knee joints and other devices related to lower limb mobility problems in the decedents. Future analytic plans will look at trends in reported lifetime history of other conditions between the 1986 and 1993 NMFS, examination of lifestyle factors related to death at very old ages, hypotheses regarding decreased use of health services in the last years of life among the very old, and possible studies of compression ofmorbidity among the oldest old. - death certificate, morbidity, oldest old - Human Subjects & Human Subjects: Interview, Questionaires, or Surveys Only
| Foley, Daniel J; Brock, Dwight B; Lanska, Douglas J (2003) Trends in dementia mortality from two National Mortality Followback Surveys. Neurology 60:709-11 |
| Bedford, S; Melzer, D; Guralnik, J (2001) Problem behavior in the last year of life: prevalence, risks, and care receipt in older Americans. J Am Geriatr Soc 49:590-5 |
