30/01/2024
When a person dies, their cause of death is assigned a code. “W67,” for example, refers specifically to a death from accidentally drowning in a swimming pool. “J14” is death from pneumonia, but just from the Hemophilus influenzae bacteria. And “O72.2” is when a mother dies from excessive blood loss more than 24 hours after giving birth. Physicians, medical examiners, and coroners document this information on death certificates, as well as any other contributing causes. It’s a clinical process at the end of an emotional experience; experts collect and analyze the codes of deaths across the country to learn what people are dying from. Then, we can create policies to respond to those causes.
“Births and deaths—this information is the foundation of our public health system,” says Marie Thoma, a reproductive and perinatal epidemiologist and professor at the University of Maryland.
In their research on maternal mortality, Thoma and her colleague Eugene Declercq, an Obstetrics and Gynecology professor at Boston University’s School of Medicine, have studied how the structure of these death certificates and informational processing systems has led to inconsistent and inaccurate data. “People think maternal mortality is kind of straightforward because they assume it’s what they’ve seen on TV, which is a tragedy at the time of birth,” Declercq says. But in reality, it’s more nuanced. Experts must get this data right, he says, because “with maternal mortality, we’re talking 700 or so deaths per year and the mistakes [in analysis] are magnified, as opposed to analyzing overall death rates.”
