Mortality Data -- Vital Statistics NCHS' Multiple Cause of Death Data, 1959-2017

Multiple Cause-of-Death Mortality Data from the National Vital Statistics System of the National Center for Health Statistics provide mortality data by multiple cause of death for all deaths occuring within the United States. Each record in the microdata is based on information abstracted from death certificates filed in vital statistics offices of each State and District of Columbia. Causes of death were coded according to the International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision 1991-1998 and the Tenth Revision 1999 on. Variables describing infant cause of death and infant age are included.

The ".zip" files can be uncompressed with uncompression software. The compressed death files are 80-85 Mb, and the compression ratio is over 90%. To check ability to uncompress these files, download the small files compress.zip. These files give an example of how to read in .zip ASCII files into SAS for UNIX without decompressing the files. To download files in Internet Explorer, right click on them and select "Save Target As...". If the pdf documents appear to be all blank pages, get the latest Acrobat Reader at www.abobe.com.

SEER provides helpful U.S. Population data for 1969 on.

1982 is the first file with both FIPS and NCHS county codes. An NCHS to FIPS state, county, and MSA crosswalk is available.

NBER internal users can obtain the data from a UNIX shell at /homes/data/mortality or on an NBER PC via Network Neighborhood --> NBER --> home --> data --> mortality

Updates and changes.

For comments or questions, e-mail jroth@nber.org