Abstract
BackgroundThe advent of the HIV pandemic and the more recent prevention and therapeutic interventions have resulted in extensive and rapid changes in cause-specific mortality rates in sub-Saharan Africa, and there is demand for timely and accurate cause-specific mortality data to steer public health responses and to evaluate the outcome of interventions. The objective of this study is to describe cause-specific mortality trends based on verbal autopsies conducted on all deaths in a rural population in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, over a 10-year period (2000-2009).MethodsThe study used population-based mortality data collected by a demographic surveillance system on all resident and nonresident members of 12,000 households. Cause of death was determined by verbal autopsy based on the standard INDEPTH/WHO verbal autopsy questionnaire. Cause of death was assigned by physician review and the Bayesian-based InterVA program.ResultsThere were 11,281 deaths over 784,274 person-years of observation of 125,658 individuals between Jan. 1, 2000 and Dec. 31, 2009. The cause-specific mortality fractions (CSMF) for the population as a whole were: HIV-related (including tuberculosis), 50%; other communicable diseases, 6%; noncommunicable lifestyle-related conditions, 15%; other noncommunicable diseases, 2%; maternal, perinatal, nutritional, and congenital causes, 1%; injury, 8%; indeterminate causes, 18%. Over the course of the 10 years of observation, the CSMF of HIV-related causes declined from a high of 56% in 2002 to a low of 39% in 2009 with the largest decline starting in 2004 following the introduction of an antiretroviral treatment program into the population. The all-cause age-standardized mortality rate (SMR) declined over the same period from a high of 174 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 165, 183) deaths per 10,000 person-years observed (PYO) in 2003 to a low of 116 (95% CI: 109, 123) in 2009. The decline in the SMR is predominantly due to a decline in the HIV-related SMR, which declined in the same period from 96 (95% CI: 89, 102) to 45 (95% CI: 40, 49) deaths per 10,000 PYO.There was substantial agreement (79% kappa = 0.68 (95% CI: 0.67, 0.69)) between physician coding and InterVA coding at the burden of disease group level.ConclusionsVerbal autopsy based methods enabled the timely measurement of changing trends in cause-specific mortality to provide policymakers with the much-needed information to allocate resources to appropriate health interventions.
Highlights
The advent of the HIV pandemic and the more recent prevention and therapeutic interventions have resulted in extensive and rapid changes in cause-specific mortality rates in sub-Saharan Africa, and there is demand for timely and accurate cause-specific mortality data to steer public health responses and to evaluate the outcome of interventions
Using data from a well-established longitudinal demographic surveillance, this study describes cause-specific mortality trends based on verbal autopsies conducted on all deaths in a rural population in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, over a 10-year period (2000-2009)
Indeterminate 29.9 46.3 53.5 51.0 48.5 57.8 59.0 62.4 60.1 61.7 population changed from 139 deaths per 10,000 person-years observed (PYO) in 2000 to a maximum of 174 in 2003 and declined to 116 in 2009 (Figure 1)
Summary
The advent of the HIV pandemic and the more recent prevention and therapeutic interventions have resulted in extensive and rapid changes in cause-specific mortality rates in sub-Saharan Africa, and there is demand for timely and accurate cause-specific mortality data to steer public health responses and to evaluate the outcome of interventions. The advent of the HIV pandemic and the more recent prevention and therapeutic interventions have resulted in extensive and rapid changes in cause-specific mortality rates in sub-Saharan Africa during the last two decades [1,2,3]. South Africa has a functioning death registration system, the quality of cause of death data has been questioned [17,18] and data from demographic surveillance studies using verbal autopsies have contributed to determining cause-specific mortality rates [19,20,21] in the country
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