Revisiting the mortality of France and Italy with the multiple-cause-of-death approach

In this paper we revisit the mortality profiles of France and Italy in 2003 using the multiple-cause-of-death approach. The method leads to a substantial upward reassessment of the role played by certain conditions - e. g. diseases of the blood and diseases of the skin - in overall mortality. Regarding the associations of causes, we distinguish three patterns of pairwise joint occurrence of causes that are common to both countries. The numerous similarities that emerge from the comparison of the two countries are a positive signal of the reliability of the multiple-cause-of-death data.