Cardiovascular Disease Data Qualifiers

Data Sources:
The source of the mortality and morbidity data is Statistics Canada. Subsequent manipulation of data was performed by the Cardiovascular Disease Division, LCDC. The economic burden of illness data was extracted from the Health Canada report "Economic Burden of Illness in Canada, 1993" by R. Moore et al.

Limitations:
There is a lag time of approximately two-three years in the data, due mainly to collection and refinement issues associated with the provinces, Statistics Canada and Health Canada.

Disease Groupings: All disease groupings follow the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) coding system created by the World Health Organization (WHO). Cardiovascular (Circulatory) disease are based on ICD-9 codes 390-459 inclusive. Ischemic heart disease currently utilizes the ICD-9 codes 410-414 and because of a historical limitation of our data system the code 429.2 is also included in this group. The codes 430-438 inclusive encompass cerebrovascular disease. And finally, ICD-9 code 410 represents acute myocardial infarction which was coded as a distinct category with the release of ICD-8 in 1969.

Standardization: Where indicated, data and graphs have been age standardized to the 1991 Canadian population. It would therefore be inappropriate to compare this information with similar data standardized to another year as differences may be solely related to changes in the underlying population distribution.