Causes of Death

The HCFA Death Notification Form is the primary source of information on causes of deaths. For overall death rates, additional information is retrieved by the USRDS from other sources including Social Security Death Benefits files and hospital discharges. Analysis of these sources reveals that the Death Notification Form is missing or incomplete in 14.3 percent of deaths. Physicians report deaths and causes of death for all ESRD patients according to a list of 22 causes of death on the Death Notification Form including categories for “other known cause” and “unknown cause.” The latter two categories were listed as 7.8 percent and 6.2 percent, respectively, of reported ESRD deaths for all patients. Future reports will contain more detailed death information since a new Death Notification Form with 60 causes of death has been developed and was fielded in the Fall of 1990. For the present USRDS report, the causes of death from the new form have been collapsed into the categories of the old form. More detail is provided below regarding withdrawal as cause of death according to the new form which inquired for each death whether withdrawal from dialysis had occurred.