MORTALITY TRENDS

• Trends in national mortality rates •  

Graphs showing time trends in mortality rates

Mortality trends for all causes of death:

age <1 year, Chile

Random graph of national mortality trends

Legend: Any faint vertical lines which may be visible in the main plotting area indicate years in which the country changed its coding of causes of death to a new version of the International Classification of Diseases.

Note about graphs for Chile: Graphs for age < 1 year and 1-14 years end in 1994 due to insufficiently detailed population data for later years.

Method: Mortality rates were calculated using data from the World Health Organization and the United Nations Population Division, then smoothed (as weighted 3-year moving averages), but not standardised for age (as the age range is, in this instance, narrow). For details, see the Info page. With each calendar year, the rate is the number of infants who died in the first year of life per 100 000 living infants aged < 1 year at the middle of that year; it will generally be about (though seldom exactly) 100 times greater than the infant mortality rate, defined as the number of deaths in the first year of life per 1000 live births.

Caution: Trends can reflect not only changes in disease occurrence or treatment, but also changes in how a cause of death is defined or coded. (The same factors can also account for differences in mortality rates between different countries.) Those due to changes in definition or coding are artefacts, and may be indicated here by dotted (or thin) lines. But, many artefactual trends have no such indication.

World Health Organization (WHO) mortality rates for particular countries, ages and causes of death