© 1998 Faculty of Public Health Medicine of the Royal Colleges of Physicians of the United Kingdom
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Seasonal variation in mortality in Moscow
Martin McKee, Professor of European Public Health
Colin Sanderson, Senior Lecturer in Health Services Research
Laurent Chenet, Research Fellow
Sergei Vassin, Senior Researcher
Vladimir Shkolnikov, Head, Laboratory for Analysis and Prognosis of Population Mortality
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine Keppel Street, London WC1E 7HT
Centre of Demography and Human Ecology, Institute for Prognosis of the National Economy of the Russian Academy of Sciences 32 Krasikova, 117418 Moscow, Russian Federation
Address correspondence to Martin McKee
BACKGROUND: Seasonal variation in mortality has been investigated in many countries but not, until recently, in Russia. There are some grounds for suspecting that it may differ in Russia from what is seen in western countries. This paper explores patterns of seasonal variation in mortality in Moscow between 1993 and 1995.
METHODS: Analysis was based on individual data on deaths occurring in Moscow between January 1993 and December 1995, grouped by four-week period and by calendar month and on mean monthly temperature in Moscow for the same period. Crude, smoothed and deseasonalized trends were inspected. Auto-correlation functions were estimated and deaths were regressed against temperature.
RESULTS: As in other northern hemisphere countries, there is a winter excess of deaths but this is much smaller than in many western countries. It is restricted to some causes of death, such as ischaemic heart disease and cerebrovascular disease, and is associated with low temperature. In contrast, there is a marked summer increase in deaths among young people, especially from accidents and other deaths associated with alcohol consumption. Over the three-year period studied, there was an initial underlying increase in alcohol related deaths that subsequently fell, coinciding with a previously observed increase in life expectancy.
CONCLUSIONS: It is possible that the low level of excess winter mortality reflects warmer indoor environments than in the west. The seasonal variation of deaths among young people reinforces evidence of the important role of alcohol in the Russian mortality crisis.
Keywords: Russia, seasonal variation, mortality, accidents, temperature
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