European Detailed Mortality Database

The text on this page is taken from an equivalent page of the IEHIAS-project.

The European Detailed Mortality Database (DMDB) contains mortality data by cause of death, age and sex, submitted to the WHO by the European Member States.

This database provides a user-friendly tool for accessing the detailed mortality data by allowing users to define and retrieve the required data by any combination of 3-digit ICD-9 or ICD-10 codes and 5-year age groups.

The cause of death may be selected using one of the three following coding systems:

• ICD-10 (International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, 10th revision)
• ICD-9 (International Classification of Diseases, 9th revision)
• MTL1 ( Mortality tabulation list 1 of the ICD-10)

Source / Reference

Competent authorities provide the World Health Organisation with the mortality data. The data comprise deaths registered in national vital registration systems, with underlying cause of death, as coded by the relevant national authority. Each Member State reports population data along with their mortality data, for the population covered by the death registration system.

The data for most European countries are relatively complete and comparable. However, in some countries the death registration coverage is low and the coding practices, particularly in the use of codes for ill-defined and unknown causes, may contain some country-specific peculiarities. In addition, some countries have difficulty in providing sufficiently accurate population estimates which are used as denominators for calculating mortality rates.