Question

Exhibit F.5 Mortality in Two Kentucky Counties, Indirect Method of Adjustment Using Kentucky Age-Specific Death Rates as a Standard
	Mortality Rates	Population		Expected Deaths
		Jefferson	Fayette	Jefferson	Fayette
<1 year	624.3	10,198	3,934	63.7	24.6
1-4 years	39.1	39,032	15,030	15.3	5.9
5-14 years	13.4	94,197	33,228	12.6	4.5
15-24 years	76.3	95,746	53,387	73.1	40.7
25-34 years	155.8	106,007	49,352	165.2	76.9
35-44 years	258.1	95,235	39,796	245.8	102.7
45-54 years	575.6	109,184	39,487	628.5	227.3
55-64 years	1,069.1	95,967	33,611	1,026.0	359.3
65-74 years	2,421.2	52,200	17,527	1,263.9	424.4
75-84 years	5,693.3	33,943	9,924	1,932.5	565.0
85+ years	15,335.9	14,740	4,548	2,260.5	697.5
All	975.6	746,449	299,824	7,686.9	2,528.7

Calculate the SMR for Jefferson and Fayette County using Kentucky as the standard and INTERPRET the SMR. The actual number of deaths for Jefferson County is 7,194 and 2,077 actual deaths in Fayette County. Show your work!!

Answer 1

SMR, or Standard Mortality Ratio, is ratio of Observed number of deaths(OD) and Expected number of deaths(ED).

Now, it is given that actual deaths for Jefferson County is 7,194 and 2,077 in Fayette County. These are the Observed number of deaths. Hence,

We are given the data of mortality rates, population and expected number of deaths. Expected nunmber of deaths could have been calculated by us even if that data was missing.

Observe, (Mortality Rate*Population)/100000 = Expected number of deaths.For example, for Jefferson, in the age group of 1-4 years,

No, Expected nnumber of deaths(ED) is the total number of expected deaths of all age groups.Hence,

Therefore,

SMR for bothe Jefferson and Fayette County is less than 1 and indicates that there were fewer deaths than expected in both regions. Deaths in Fayette were much less than expected as the SMR is 0.82. The population data of Fayette shows that most of the population is in the age group 5-55 years. The age group of 75 plus has very few people as compared to the rest. This is the age group where we mortality rate is the highest. Hence the actual number of deaths were less than expected.