[Babase] Dcause
Karl O. Pinc
babase@www.eco.princeton.edu
Tue, 11 May 2004 16:52:55 -0500
On 2004.05.07 10:23 Daphne Onderdonk wrote:
> 1) There were already quite a few individuals with a status of 1 and a
> dcause of 0 (in the old list - before I changed the pre-01b dcauses to
> 0). I imagine this will be a problem since we are doing this update
> of
> dcauses to avoid having 0s in the dcause column. Do we want to just
> make them all 7s (unknown), or try to assign real dcauses to them?
Another option is to assign a new decause (8, Unknown but under review)
if there's a reason to separate the ones you've looked at from the
ones you're planning to look at. (And you've not got some other
criteria.)
> > To clarify: abortions have a (new) dcause of either 4 or 7.
> > (5 is not used for abortions, right?)
>
> We have been using 7 (new unknown) for aborts (I have a note on the
> dcause definition list from a conversation with Jeanne and Susan about
> this). Karl, I'm not sure if you mean old 4 or new 4. Old 4 was
> unknown. New 4 is pathology/congenital problems, which to my
> knowledge
> we have not used for aborts.
I was wondering about the new 4, which seemed a possible encoding
for abortions.
> What were the rules that you had for
> dcauses of aborts, Karl?
I believe the values were either unknown or dead due to death of mother.
>
> 4) The situation that needs clarifying is when the fetus dies because
> the mother dies. At the beginning of the new dcause definition list,
> it
> says the following:
>
> If a mother and infant disappear at the same time and a cause is
> attributed to the mother's death, the same cause is attributed to the
> infant's death unless contraindicated by available evidence.
>
> When Jeanne and Suan and I talked about dcauses earlier, and it was
> decided that this applied to infants AND fetuses (I have another note
> about this on the sheet). Do we want to stick with this? As I see
> it,
> this would have 2 implications. First, it would mean that aborts, if
> they are due to the mom's death, would NOT be restricted to certain
> dcauses - they could get whatever dcause was assigned to the mother.
> Second, it means that an infant (or fetus, if that's what we decide)
> would not get a dcause of 5 (loss of mother in both old and new lists)
> unless the mother's cause of death is unknown. (Right? Am I
> interpreting this correctly?) So I think there are some 5s for
> infants
> (and maybe fetuses) that should have the mother's dcause instead.
> Steph, I think it would be a good idea to check for these 5s, both in
> the pre-01b list I'm sending you, and in the post-01b data currently
> in
> Biograph, and see if they shouldn't get the mother's dcause instead.
Everything depends on how you're querying and using the data so long as
either system of coding abort's dcauses you don't lose any information.
Note that with the old way of encoding death due to mother's death
you can query for that event directly and trace the dcause through to
the dcause of the mother. With the new system it's easier to get
abortion cause of death but harder to tell if the death is due to
death of the mother. With the new system the assumption is that
death is due to death of the mother when both infant and mother die
on the same day. (Note that if they happen to die on the same day
but in separate events you can only tell if the dcause is different
for the mother and infant. Theoretically this is a problem
with the new system's coding, the one place where information
can be lost.) Seems like the 5 code is pretty much
redundant in the new system as it always means "unknown".
I'd consider getting rid of it for the sake of consistency.
Karl <kop@meme.com>
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