Mortality Data Paper

Divine Writers
Health Sciences and Medicine
27 June 2012
                                        Mortality Data Paper
Introduction
Mortality data is the type of data in which it is indicated the amount of people die annually and the reasons that caused them to die. The data also represents the type of diseases and their effects on the society that have to fact them. This is done to measure a nation’s system of health. When a country’s health department has the mortality data it helps them understand better if the department is focusing on the right health issues that their country might be facing.

Strengths of Mortality Data
The word mortal means something having a specific life or time period after which it is supposed to end. Measuring how many people die in a country annually and the reasons of their deaths will help a country health department attain the heights that they aim for. A country’s health department aim towards achieving the cures of diseases that are the most common cause of their people’s deaths. Mortality data is created for just this reason. It is to study how a disease occurs, the amount of people it targets, the group of people it targets, the majority and the minority of the targeted audience, the average age for the disease to occur, the average age for the disease to become fatal and so on so forth. The strength of mortality data is to provide solutions and offer amendments to the government of the country as to how the government’s budget dedicated to a certain disease should be decreased if the amount of people suffering from it are not enough and increase the budget to some other disease which is causing illness in a larger groups of people so as to find a cure for it and help the patients as much as possible.
The mortality data is also used for comparing results over a certain period of time, for example comparing the mortality data of every year with each other. This helps the health department decide whether they are concentrating on the most recent health problem of their people or not. The ways that the health department may help is to offer remedies for a certain disease, be it a diet change, environment change, or adopting a lifestyle that might help the patient as well. These ways are also suggested from the health department to a country’s people apart from working on a cure with help from the government. Mortality data is very important for a country to keep its people content that whenever their immune cells may fail to fight back an intruder in the bodily systems, their health system will be there to provide them with the best of help that they can.

Limitations of Mortality Data
Even though collection of mortality data is highly necessary for any country but everything comes with it pros and cons. The limitations that the mortality data have, even in this modern age, stand in the face of health departments and cannot be ignored. Gathering as much information as possible for the study of a disease may help in curing it but not prove to be as helpful in preventing it. The information collected on a disease is only there because of the patients who suffer from it, if people would not suffer, medical societies would not be able to gather the information they need from every individual patient to help themselves study and understand the disease better. The limitations of mortality data apply to every aspect that the researchers might try researching in; mortality rate of women, men, mothers, infants, elderly, teenagers, people of a certain ethnicity, area, everything that might be taken into consideration, is, and increases the limitations accordingly with the amount of aspects observed.
An attempt at explaining a few of the mortality rates, their limitations and uses is being mentioned in this paper.

Standardized Mortality Ratio
Standardized mortality ratio is the ratio of the deaths that health officials expect a number of population to have co-relating them with the deaths of people occurred in a certain number of people due to a chosen reason in the past. It is like comparing two groups of people, one from the past, and the current one in study. The comparison takes place to predict the number of death in a present year after studying the results of past years. The past year for comparison may be any; it is usually a computer generated one. Standardized Mortality Ratio also known as SMR is a very useful kind of data. It is used for comparing results between two or more groups that the researchers might choose to study.

Age Standard Mortality Rate
Age Standardized Mortality Rate is usually the simplest of mortality data in which it is predicted that which type of population, based on their age, might become a victim of a disease comparing them to a group of past patients.

Crude Mortality Rate
Crude Mortality Rate reflects the deaths that have occurred in a specific population in a certain time period. Crude Mortality Rates are not that dependable because of differences in age, gender and other factors that a certain population might comprise of.

Cause Specific Mortality Rate
Cause Specific Mortality Rate comprises of the greatest values that might be used for studying the causes of deaths. These causes may contain diseases like cancer, heart diseases, infections and such and are compared to other populations depending on the cause. The different populations used for comparisons are based on their occupations, religious beliefs and time periods. Cause Specific Mortality Rate has so far been the most helpful in the understanding of the factors that a disease may involve and have caused further in-depth study to be persuaded because of better results.

Age Standardized Mortality Rate
Age Standardized Mortality Rate is helpful to remove the irregularities that the Crude Mortality Rate contains and helps reduce them by making adjustments. In this type of rate the simplest way to calculate mortality data is to compare the facts and figures of one population to a population comprising only of a certain age group and observing what the affects shown are and studying them.