Multiple causes of death
While it is often the case that more than one cause of death is reported, until recently, only the single underlying cause of death was used to produce statistics on mortality for the Australian population. However, it has been argued that some deaths would not occur without the influence of more than one cause, and that to understand mortality patterns of a population it is important to examine, where possible, all the causes which contribute to death. In particular, deaths due to chronic diseases, such as heart disease, kidney disease and diabetes, often occur with a number of concurrent, or coexisting, conditions present, and a single initiating condition is often difficult to isolate. For example, in 1997-99 there were 751 deaths of Indigenous persons where the underlying cause of death was ischaemic heart disease. For 17% of these deaths, ischaemic heart disease alone was reported on the death certificate as the cause of death. One or more associated causes were reported for the remainder. The most commonly associated cause of death reported with ischaemic heart disease was other forms of heart disease.…
