Life Table Analysis System

MCOD Corrections

In July 2011, the LTAS team discovered several problems associated with earlier releases of some MCOD rate files. The following message was sent to registered users:

These problems are summarized in Table 1 and fixed in November 2011. A message was sent to notify users of the corrected rate files available for download at an ftp site. The current location is: http://ftp.cdc.gov/pub/LTAS-NET/.

The updated files are also included in the latest LTAS.NET version 3.0.5.

Table 1: Problems associated with earlier releases of the U.S. and State LTAS.NET MCOD rate files

1. Rate denominators were inadvertently created as the product of 2. 5 and MCOD counts from all minors in a sex/race/age/calendar combination if the population in that cell was less than the product (2.5 x MCOD counts); however, this only affected the 85+ age category. This problem also existed with the MCOD rate files used in previous versions of LTAS (i.e., PC-LTAS).
2. For minors 057, 092, 093, 101 and 109, no codes existed before 1968, so the MCOD rates for the calendar period 1960-64 should be zero. MCOD rates for 1965-1969 were inadvertently copied back for 1960-64, resulting in 1960-64 MCOD rates that were too high (should be zero) for these minors.
3. For minors 057, 092, 093, 101 and 109, no codes existed before 1968, so the MCOD rates for the calendar period 1965-69 should be calculated as (MCOD counts in 1968 + MCOD counts in 1969)/(total population size for years 1965 through 1969). However, MCOD rates for 1965-1969 were inadvertently adjusted by (5/2), resulting in 1965-69 MCOD rates that were too high for these minors.
4. State codes inadvertently were not converted to Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) codes in three calendar periods (1980-84, 1985-89, and 1990-94). See state-to-FIPS code conversion table below. This caused the MCOD rates to be too high for some states (usually smaller states) and too low for others (usually larger states). The LTAS website previously had incorrect 1960-2007 state MCOD rates for download. State MCOD 1960-2005 rates were not available on the website for download, but were released upon request. Please note that because of a change in the data use agreement with the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), we can no longer provide state mortality rate files. If you need individual state rate files, please contact NCHS to obtain the mortality data, and follow the instructions in the LTAS.NET manual to create them. If you have problem in create the files, please contact us for assistance.

Table 2: Conversion between state and FIPS codes in NCHS data

Both codes were reported starting 1980. State code must be converted to FIPS to create rate files.