UK Sudden Adult Death Syndrome data 2018 to 2022

FOI/2023/4743

You asked

​​Please supply the number of deaths for all age groups in the UK resulting from/classified as Sudden Adult Death Syndrome for all of 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022.

We said

Thank you for your enquiry.

We are responsible for the production of mortality data for England and Wales, this is driven by information collected from the death certificate at death registration. National Records Scotland (NRS) and Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA) are responsible for statistics pertaining to Scotland and Northern Ireland. They can be contacted at foi@nrscotland.gov.uk and info@nisra.gov.uk respectively.

All of the conditions mentioned on the death certificate are coded using the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision (ICD-10). From all these causes, an underlying cause of death is selected using ICD-10 coding rules. The underlying cause of death is defined by World Health Organisation (WHO) as:

a) the disease or injury that initiated the train of events directly leading to death, or

b) the circumstances of the accident or violence that produced the fatal injury

The ICD-10 code for Sudden Adult Death Syndrome is R96, however we also can look at I49.9 Cardiac Arrythmia and I46.1 Sudden Cardiac Death.

For deaths where the above ICD-10 codes have been used as the underlying cause of death this information can be found on our interactive webservice NOMIS.

Please see the associated download, which is an output from NOMIS, with 2018 to 2021 data for England and Wales, including non-residents by 5-year age group.

Should you wish to extract data from NOMIS yourself, please see the following instructions:

• Select dates – 2013 to 2021
• Select the geography (England and Wales, regional or by local authority)
• Select Age – All ages or 5-year age bands
• Select Gender – Total or Male/Female
• Select rates – All deaths, rates or percentage of population for example
• Select cause of death (ICD10 code search is available)
• Select format (Excel or CSV for example)

We have not conducted analysis deaths due to Adult Sudden Death Syndrome for 2022.

2022 data is still in provisional format to allow the inclusion of late registrations, which are deaths referred for Coroner investigation. This analysis will be published in July 2023 on our NOMIS Webservice and as part of the 21^st Century Mortality publication. The publication date will be announced on our Release Calendar.

However, we can provide this as a bespoke request for you using provisional data. User requested datasets are subject to disclosure control, legal frameworks, resources and agreement to costs under the ONS Charging policy. If you would like to discuss this further, or to obtain a quote for this work please contact the Health Analysis and Pandemic Insight (HAPI) Customer Service team at Health.Data@ons.gov.uk.