You asked
How much does Diabetic Heart Disease contribute to Ischaemic Heart Disease death statistics? Or are they entirely separate statistics, with Diabetic Heart Disease considered an exclusive statistic for the Diabetes Mellitus death toll only, and not considered in the statistics for Ischaemic Heart Disease?
The World Health Organisation's site has a page called "the top 10 causes of death," which lists Ischaemic Heart Disease at the top with roughly 15 million deaths in 2015. My question is how are the death statistics for Ischaemic Heart Disease and Diabetes Mellitus are calculated? Are the statistics for Ischaemic Heart Disease and Diabetic Heart Disease mutually exclusive (one belonging to the heart disease category, the other belonging to the diabetes category), or combined?
We said
Thank you for your recent request.
Cause of death is coded using the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth revision (ICD-10). There is no specific code for Diabetic Heart Disease.
The software used by us to code cause of death for England and Wales is a package called IRIS. There may be up to 15 causes mentioned on a death certificate, and the order of these mentions will determine which underlying cause is assigned. Each death is assigned only one underlying cause and therefore the top 10 causes of death listed on the WHOs website should be mutually exclusive.
If Diabetic Heart Disease is mentioned on a death certificate, IRIS assigns it a code for diabetes mellitus and a code for heart disease, and diabetes mellitus is taken as the underlying cause of death. This means that for England and Wales, deaths from Diabetic heart disease are included in the diabetes mellitus death toll, and not ischaemic heart disease.
We only code cause of death for England and Wales, and coding practices may differ globally. If you would like to know the coding practices of specific countries you will need to contact them directly.
Other special extracts and tabulations of deaths data for England and Wales are available (subject to legal frameworks, disclosure control, resources and agreement of costs, where appropriate). If you would like any further information, you can contact the team directly at: vsob@ons.gov.uk