摘要：Background: For public health purposes, it is important to see whether men and women in different age groups die of the same causes in South Africa.Objective: We explored sex- and age-specific patterns of causes of deaths in a rural demographic surveillance site in northern KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa over the period 2000–2011.Design: Deaths reported through the demographic surveillance were followed up by a verbal autopsy (VA) interview using a standardised questionnaire. Causes of death were assigned likelihoods using the publicly available tool InterVA-4. Cause-specific mortality fractions were determined by age and sex.Results: Over the study period, a total of 5,416 (47%) and 6,081 (53%) deaths were recorded in men and women, respectively. Major causes of death proportionally affecting more women than men were (all p<0.0001): human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS) (20.1% vs. 13.6%), other and unspecified cardiac disease (5.9% vs. 3.2%), stroke (4.5% vs. 2.7%), reproductive neoplasms (1.7% vs. 0.4%), diabetes (2.4% vs. 1.2%), and breast neoplasms (0.4% vs. 0%). Major causes of deaths proportionally affecting more men than women were (all p<0.0001) assault (6.1% vs. 1.7%), pulmonary tuberculosis (34.5% vs. 30.2%), road traffic accidents (3.0% vs. 1.0%), intentional self-harm (1.3% vs. 0.3%), and respiratory neoplasms (2.5% vs. 1.5%). Causes of death due to communicable diseases predominated in all age groups except in older persons.Conclusions: While mortality during the 2000s was dominated by tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS, we found substantial sex-specific differences both for communicable and non-communicable causes of death, some which can be explained by a differing sex-specific age structure. InterVA-4 is likely to be a valuable tool for investigating causes of death patterns in other similar Southern African settings.Keywords: mortality; cause of death; demographic surveillance; South Africa; HIV/AIDS; tuberculosis; verbal autopsy(Published: 29 October 2014)Citation: Glob Health Action 2014, 7: 25496 - http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/gha.v7.25496SPECIAL ISSUE: This paper is part of the Special Issue: INDEPTH Network Cause-Specific Mortality. More papers from this issue can be found at http://www.globalhealthaction.net
关键词：Global Health; Demography; Population Health;;mortality; cause of death; demographic surveillance; South Africa; HIV/AIDS; tuberculosis; verbal autopsy;RA407-409.5
