Deaths: injuries, 2001

This report presents injury mortality data for 2001 using the external cause of injury mortality matrix for the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision (ICD-10), a detailed and comprehensive framework for tabulating and presenting injury deaths by mechanism and intent of death. Data are presented by age, sex, race, Hispanic origin, and State. This report also presents data on injury deaths classified according to the nature of the injury sustained. Deaths resulting from the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, are presented and the impact of these deaths on the trends in injury mortality is discussed. This report supplements the annual report of final mortality statistics.

Data in this report are based on information from all death certificates filed in the 50 States and the District of Columbia in 2001. Causes of death and nature of injury are processed and coded in accordance with the ICD-10.

In 2001, 157,078 resident deaths occurred as the result of injuries. Of these injury deaths, 64.6 percent were classified as unintentional, 19.5 percent were suicides, 12.9 percent were homicides, 2.7 percent were of undetermined intent, and 0.3 percent involved legal intervention or operations of war. The five leading mechanisms of injury death were motor vehicle traffic, firearm, poisoning, falls, and suffocation, accounting for 78 percent of all injury deaths. A head injury was mentioned in 32 percent of injury deaths and was the most commonly mentioned injury condition resulting in death. Poisoning and toxic effects were the second most common, mentioned in 16 percent of injury deaths and were the underlying cause of 14 percent of injury deaths. In 2001, 36,753 deaths (1.6 percent of deaths) had a natural underlying cause of death but included one or more mentions of an external cause on the death certificate.

Injury mortality data presented in this report using the external cause of injury mortality matrix for ICD-10 provide detail on the mechanism of death needed for research and other activities related to injury prevention. This report also highlights the importance of multiple causes of death when analyzing injury mortality data. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) is involved in several ongoing projects related to the study of injury and injury mortality.