Cause of death patterns in Ukraine’s regions

Svitlana Poniakina, Institut National d'Études Démographiques (INED)
France Meslé, Institut National d'Études Démographiques (INED)

There are substantial differences in mortality across regions in Ukraine - life expectancy is high on the West and low on the East and South. The interregional difference between max and min life expectancy reaches 5.3 year. Unfavorable situation in population health is also explained by preservation of archaic for 21st century nosological structure of mortality, which combines features of traditional and modern structures of pathologies (Pirozhkov, 2004; Levchuk et al, 2007). Namely it is characterized by high mortality rates from endogenous (cerebrovascular diseases, cancers) and exogenous (infectious and parasitic diseases, respiratory and digestive system disease, violent deaths) components at the same time. Cause-mortality profiles differ across Ukraine. Thematic maps do not give a complex view of regions’ distribution according to death rates from different causes at the same time. In this paper we employ correspondence analysis in order to visualize associations that may exist between regions and particular causes of death, and to classify regions into some subcategories. Analysis concentrates around the year of last census in Ukraine, 2001. Contingency table is presented by Standardized Death Rates for 16 selected groups of causes for 26 regions of Ukraine. With the help of two- and three-dimensional graphs there were distinguished two general patterns: one typical for western and some northern regions with prevailing mortality from heart and respiratory diseases; and another pattern particular for some southern and eastern regions suffering predominantly from exogenous influences.