Response: Let's Leave the Date Out of the Name of the Standard Population

Extract

The letter by Taylor and Anton-Culver makes some useful points about the recently implemented policy of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to adopt a single population standard for calculating age-adjusted death rates. Use of a single population standard will greatly reduce the burden on state and local health agencies, who heretofore often had to produce multiple death rates to match Federal benchmarks; thus, the National Cancer Institute used the 1970 population standard for producing cancer incidence and mortality data, while the National Center for Health Statistics and state vital statistics offices used the 1940 population, and other parts of the Centers for Disease Control used 1980 and 1990 (1). Not only did multiple standards create an unnecessary and enormous burden, but they created confusion among data users and the media. These problems alone justify the policy to change standards. We also agree with the authors that age-adjusted death rates have no intrinsic meaning; they are statistical constructs that permit comparisons over time and among groups, unbiased by differences in the age distributions of the compared groups. And their point that age-adjusted death rates should be supplemented by age-specific analyses is a good one that we have stressed (2).