This is a bit silly question. How to calculate "average'' age-adjusted mortality rate for 15-year period of time if I have age-adjusted mortality rate for every specific year? Second question is "average'' age-specified mortality rate based on annual number of death in that age group. # Deaths in age group is know, but population in age group varies year-to-year. Should I used average number of deaths (total number divided by number of years) and compare with population in the middle of the observed period of time?
Thanks for answering.
For the first part, if you mean age standardized (ie relative to some standard population), then you could just calculate the average of the 15 values.
If you mean age specific , and the age distribution and total numbers did not vary much between years, you could calculate the average of the 15 values for each age category.
For the second part your suggestion is a reasonable approach.
First question - average the age standardized rates
Second question - you could also do a weighted average of the mortality rates in each period using as weights the population in each period
Thanks you Ms. Cardis and Mrs. Leight.
Firstly, I wil use average the age standardized rates.
Secondly, I will calcualte ratio between average number of deaths and average number of siza population.
maybe i completely misunderstand your question, and i'm by no means an expert in mortality rates and the like, but if you need a rate for a 15-year period of time then don't you have to multiply the rates for the individual years instead of averaging them? and if you also want to know the average yearly rate then wouldn't you calculate the 15th root of the resulting product?
for the second why not do age specific mortalities for each year (which will factor in the difference in population from year to year) and take the average of these 15 rates? 15 is not a large number of years to deal with.
You have more options. If you want to calculate the average value for each age category you calculate that as the average for relativl numbers (you have formula in every statistic).
For the second quesion . You can calculate thат using the formula for indirect standardization (you have the formula on the WHO website)
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