Question

Below are some crude mortality rates from the 2003-2008 study among 25-44 year old men and women.

	Crude mortality rate per 100,000 person-years
	25-44 Year Old Men	25-44 Year Old Women
Drug Overdose	346.9	172.6
Substance Use Disorder	90.5	43.1
HIV Disease	79.2	43.1

1. Using the relative measure of association, compare the three cause-specific mortality rates among men to that among women (i.e., use women as the referent group). State in words your interpretation of each of these measures.

No need to answer this, just part. 2

2. What is the main advantage of limiting the male-female comparisons to 25-44 year olds?

Answer 1

You have asked to answer only question 2 from the two given questions.

The data is provided on the mortality rate per 100,000 persons year due to three causes namely, drug overdose, substance use disorder, and HIV disease. The mortality is compared across gender in both males and females.

However, for the purpose of the study only males and females within the age range of 25 and 44 years are considered in the study.

The reason for this is that people aged 45 years and above are more likely to die because of several other complications like age, cancer, etc.. Also, they are unlikely to have sexual encounters thereby biasing the HIV results. Additionally, people aged below 25 are unlikely to have faced issues due to either of these because HIV takes years to manifest its symptoms and drug abuse is also a gradual process.

Therefore, to ensure that the results are representative and belongs to a relatively stable population, the age group between 25 and 44 years would have been considered for this study.