OBJECTIVES This report presents complete period life tables by Hispanic origin, race for the non-Hispanic white and non-Hispanic black populations, and sex for the United States based on age-specific death rates in 2006. METHODS The methods used to estimate the probability of death for ages 0-80 for the Hispanic population and 0-65 for the non-Hispanic white and non-Hispanic black populations...

BACKGROUND Life expectancy is shorter and mortality from cardiovascular disease higher among blacks than among whites in the United States. We studied whether place of birth was associated with mortality from cardiovascular causes among non-Hispanic black and white residents of New York City. METHODS We linked mortality records from 1988 through 1992 with 1990 U.S. census data for New York Ci...

From AD 1347 to AD 1353, the Black Death killed tens of millions of people in Europe, leaving misery and devastation in its wake, with successive epidemics ravaging the continent until the 18(th) century. The etiology of this disease has remained highly controversial, ranging from claims based on genetics and the historical descriptions of symptoms that it was caused by Yersinia pestis to concl...

BACKGROUND The US Food and Drug Administration issued a black box warning regarding the use of droperidol and the potential for torsade de pointes (TdP). METHODS The primary objective of this retrospective study was to determine whether low-dose droperidol administration increased the incidence of TdP in the general surgical population during a 3-yr time period before and after the Food and D...

Government agencies provide regular reports on progress in the fight against cancer, and these reports are viewed with great interest by researchers and by the media (1). The primary measures of the cancer burden are cancer incidence rates and cancer mortality rates. The latter are derived from state death certificates, which are completed by physicians, medical examiners, coroners, and funeral...

AIMS This study examines predictors of neonatal and postneonatal mortality among infants born to black, white, and Hispanic women. METHODS Linked birth/infant death records from North Carolina for the period 1999-2007 were the source of data. Logistic regression models were constructed to estimate the effect of maternal and infant characteristics on neonatal (<28 days) and postneonatal (28-36...

In this paper, we examine black-white differences in cause-specific mortality during the 1980s when blackwhite disparities in mortality widened in the United States. We group causes of death to those amenable to medical intervention, those closely linked to health behaviors or residential location, and all other causes combined. At older ages, we treat cardiovascular disease, stroke, and forms ...

PROBLEM/CONDITION The Healthy People 2000: National Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Objectives specifies goals of no more than 3.3 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births overall and no more than 5.0 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births among black women; as of 1990, these goals had not been met. In addition, race-specific differences between black women and white women persist in th...

In most modern populations, there are sex differentials in morbidity and mortality that favor women. This study addresses whether such female advantages existed to any appreciable degree in medieval Europe. The analyses presented here examine whether men and women with osteological stress markers faced the same risks of death in medieval London. The sample used for this study comes from the Eas...

BACKGROUND Among cancer patients, probabilities of death from that cancer and other causes in the presence of competing risks are optimal measures of prognosis and of mortality across demographic groups. We used data on breast cancer patients from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) Program in a competing-risk analysis. METHODS We determined vital status and cause of death ...