This part of the website provides a profile of mortality trends in the population of England from 1996 to 2004 for a large number of medical conditions. The data are derived from death certificates. For each death, the Office for National Statistics codes one underlying cause of death. Where more than one cause of death is certified, all the causes are termed ‘mentions’. Our analyses provide information about trends in mortality by certified underlying cause of death, and also about trends in mortality for all ‘mentions’. For each condition, a table of age- and sex- specific mortality rates is presented together with graphs of annual death rates for males and females.

Deaths were coded to the ninth revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD9) for the years 1996-2000 and to ICD10 for 2001-2004. Age-specific mortality rates in 5-year age-groups were used to calculate age-standardised mortality rates with 95% confidence intervals for each time period. Age-standardised rates for each individual calendar year were calculated by applying the age-specific rates in each five-year age-group in each calendar year to the European standard population. We calculated the average annual percentage change from 1996-2004 in mortality rates for mentions, using data for each individual calendar year, by fitting linear regression models to the logarithms of the death rates. Deaths in the final year for which data are available, namely 2004, may be slightly low due to late registration of some deaths

Users of these data should note that there may be discontinuities in mortality trends for some conditions because of the changeover from ICD9 to ICD10 coding in 2001. The number of available codes was expanded substantially with the ICD10 revision. In addition, the list of conditions affected by Rule 3, an ICD rule that governs the selection of the underlying cause of death, is different from, that for ICD9.

The analyses have been undertaken as a collaboration between the Unit of Health-Care Epidemiology, Oxford University and the South East Public Health Observatory (SEPHO). They were performed on the SEPHO death file, which was provided by the Office for National Statistics.

Individual diseases or groups of diseases: