Patterns of United States Mortality for Ten Selected Causes of Death

摘要

Income, ethnicity, education, and occupation are examples of socio-economic factors associated with the occurrence of disease, whether an investigation focuses on an individual or on an aggregation of individuals. In this study, data aggregated to the county level are used to explore two issues - geographic variation and geographic covariation of ten selected causes of death in the United States. The counties of the United States are characterized by 15 socio-economic variables and age-adjusted mortality rates for the ten selected causes of death. The observed variation among the US counties, as measured by the socio-economic variables, is first assessed, then the geographic variation and covariation are described for each cause of death and, finally, the covariation among causes of death is analyzed after adjusting for the influences of the measured sources of county variation. (ERA citation 07:062056)