Multimorbidity at Death: What Are the Most Common Causes?

Aline DESESQUELLES , INED
Magali Barbieri, INED
Viviana Egidi, La Sapienza Università di Roma
Luisa Frova, Italian National Institute of Statistics
Francesco Grippo, ISTAT
France Meslé, Institut National d'Etudes Demographiques (INED)
Marilena Pappagallo, Italian National Institute of Statistics
Sergi Trias-Llimós , Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Demographers interested in cause-of-death analysis more and more frequently use all the medical information reported on the death certificate, herein labeled multiple causes, to monitor the contribution of multimorbidity to processes leading to death. Using an algorithm to classify all death records in a given population according to three exhaustive types of processes leading to death (simple, multimorbid and ill-defined) (Grippo et al. 2024), Barbieri et al. (2025) recently assessed the impact of multi-morbidity at death on the mortality gap between the US and three other high-income countries with comparable data, namely France, Italy, and Spain. The results show disproportionately high rates of multi-morbid processes in the US compared with the other three countries. Building on this previous work, we aim at identifying the causes of death (whether underlying or contributing) involved in multi-morbid processes, in the hope of uncovering consistent patterns across the four study countries.

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 Presented in Session 98. Causes of Death and Multi-Morbidity at Death