Please note that the pages on this website do not reflect the methods and definitions that were used to generate the final set of results for the GBD-2010 study, which was published in December 2012.
-- If you are interested in the methods or results of GBD-2010 and subsequent revisions, please visit the official website of IHME's GBD project (http://www.healthdata.org/gbd). The materials described on the website are now obsolete but these webpages have been retained as an internet archive of the work of the group.
-- Please visit the website www.globalburdenofinjuries.org to find out more about other closely related collaborations of our group members.
Last Update: July 15th 2009
Status of discussion: Closed
Lead authors: Kavi Bhalla & James Harrison
Additional author: Lois Fingerhut, Margaret Warner, Mohsen Naghavi
Lurking members: Saeid Shahraz, Tim Driscoll
Issue: The ICD includes categories that specify causes and conditions well and other categories that are less specific. For example, in ICD-10, R99 means "Other ill-defined and unspecified causes of mortality" and X59 means "Exposure to unspecified factor". Cases assigned such codes should be accounted for in GBD calculations, but to which cause or condition should they be attributed? This does not matter much if a small proportion of cases have such codes, but these codes appear frequently in some datasets. For example, X59 appears as the Underlying Cause of death for about 10% of injury deaths in Mexico. Common practice in previous GBD work has been to re-assign such cases in simple proportion to specifically-coded cases, within age and sex strata. Is this approach sufficiently reliable? This paper examines which poorly specified categories are important for injury, and whether the simple proportionate re-assignment method (within age- sex- strata) is sufficient for the purposes of the GBD 2005 project.
What are we doing?
Because of the importance of this issue for the expert group, various group members have volunteered to undertake analysis of dump codes in the data sets they use. Here is a list of what is currently being done: