Important Facts for Death Rates from Leading Causes of Death

Definition

Death rates for the leading causes of death are the number of deaths from each cause per 100,000 New Mexico population, age-adjusted to the U.S. 2000 standard population, and ranked according to the age-adjusted death rate.

Numerator

Number of deaths from the specified cause

Denominator

Total population

Data Interpretation Issues

Using age-adjusted deaths produces a slightly different ranking than that produced from death counts. The 10 leading causes of death, ranked in order of highest numbers of New Mexico deaths are as follows: Coronary heart disease, cancer, unintentional injuries, chronic lower respiratory disease, stroke, diabetes, suicide, Alzheimer's disease, chronic liver disease, and influenza and pneumonia.

Why Is This Important?

Death rates by leading causes of death show areas where health improvement and prevention programs should be targeted to affect the most people.

How Are We Doing?

Heart Disease, the leading cause of death, accounted for 15.2% of all deaths in the state, followed by Malignant Neoplasms (Cancer) at 15.9% and Unintentional Injuries at 5.8%.

Other Program Information

For informaiton on leading causes of death by county, see the NM-IBIS Community Health Highlights reports by county, here: http://ibis.health.state.nm.us/community/highlight/Selection.html.

Community Health Assessment Program, New Mexico Department of Health, Epidemiology and Response Division, 1190 St. Francis Dr., P.O. Box 26110, Santa Fe, NM, 87502. Contact Lois Haggard at Lois.Haggard@state.nm.us or by telephone at (505) 827-5274
The information provided above is from the New Mexico Department of Health's NM-IBIS web site (http://ibis.health.state.nm.us). The information published on this website may be reproduced without permission. Please use the following citation: "Retrieved Wed, 19 June 2013 1:35:33 from New Mexico Department of Health, Indicator-Based Information System for Public Health Web site: http://ibis.health.state.nm.us".

Content updated: Thu, 14 Jun 2012 13:14:00 MDT