Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 1996 May;33(2):193-209.

African-American mortality at older ages: results of a matching study

S H Preston  1 , I T Elo, I Rosenwaike, M Hill
Affiliations
  • PMID: 8827165

African-American mortality at older ages: results of a matching study

S H Preston et al. Demography. 1996 May.

Abstract

In this paper we investigate the quality of age reporting on death certificates of elderly African-Americans. We link a sample of death certificates of persons age 65+ in 1985 to records for the same individuals in U.S. censuses of 1900, 1910, and 1920 and to records of the Social Security Administration. The ages at death reported on death certificates are too young on average. Errors are greater for women than for men. Despite systematic under-reporting of age at death, too many deaths are registered at ages 95+. This excess reflects an age distribution of deaths that declines steeply with age, so that the base for upward transfers into an age category is much larger than the base for the transfers downward and out. When corrected ages at death are used to estimate age-specific death rates, African-American mortality rates increase substantially above age 85 and the racial "crossover" in mortality disappears. Uncertainty about white rates at ages 95+, however, prevents a decisive racial comparison at the very oldest ages.

PubMed Disclaimer

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

See all "Cited by" articles

References

    1. Hum Biol. 1981 Feb;53(1):47-67 - PubMed
    1. N Engl J Med. 1990 Jan 18;322(3):173-7 - PubMed
    1. Popul Index. 1982 Summer;48(2):217-59 - PubMed
    1. Demography. 1994 Aug;31(3):427-58 - PubMed
    1. JAMA. 1990 Feb 9;263(6):845-50 - PubMed

Publication types

MeSH terms

LinkOut - more resources

  NODES
admin 2
twitter 2