The Reliability of Certificates of Deaths from Cancer (1940)

This 1940 article from the United States Public Health Service did not study asbestos. It examined how reliably death certificates recorded cancer. Using a cancer incidence survey in ten urban areas, the authors compared the primary cancer site reported by physicians and hospitals with the death certificate for 13,524 people. When sites were grouped into nine broad categories, 84.5 per cent of certificates agreed with the survey report. Agreement was highest for the digestive tract (92.6 per cent) and lowest for skin (42.6 per cent) and brain (46.3 per cent). Bone cancer showed only slightly better agreement. For specific sites, agreement was 77.3 per cent. Overall, 4.8 per cent of certificates gave a nonmalignant cause, but 48.5 per cent did for brain cancer, largely because entries such as "brain tumor" were coded as tumors of unspecified nature. Of 602 lung or pleura cancers, 104 were classed as other respiratory sites on the certificate, and the authors stated that published lung cancer deaths were too small. Ages fell in the same five-year group in 74.7 per cent of cases. The authors cautioned that the survey diagnoses could not definitely be shown to be more accurate than the certificates.

We wrote this plain-English summary from the full article with the help of AI, and a second AI model checked each sentence against the article. It is not the authors' wording; the abstract and the article are their own account.

From J-M's medical library

This copy comes from the Johns-Manville medical library. It was among the papers J-M kept in its medical library without an index entry.