Guibert R
Family Medicine Department, Université de Montréal, Québec.
Can J Public Health. 1991 Jan-Feb;82(1):43-5.
The recent decline in Coronary Heart Disease (CHD) mortality rates has been attributed to reduction in risk factors and to improved management. In this article, we review whether artefacts of classification could have played a role as well. Knowledge and information on disease, competing causes of death, death certification accuracy and completeness, advancing age of the population with multiple conditions as well as death certificate coding practice could have affected secular trends of CHD mortality rates. However, the lack of noticeable shifts within the cardiovascular category or with another category makes it difficult for the CHD decline to be artefactual.
近期冠心病（CHD）死亡率的下降归因于风险因素的减少和管理的改善。在本文中，我们也探讨了分类假象是否也起到了作用。关于疾病的知识和信息、相互竞争的死亡原因、死亡证明的准确性和完整性、患有多种疾病的人群年龄增长以及死亡证明编码实践等，都可能影响冠心病死亡率的长期趋势。然而，心血管类别内部或与其他类别之间缺乏明显变化，这使得冠心病死亡率的下降不太可能是假象所致。
