Death - OHDSI/ETL--PulmonaryHypertensionRegistries GitHub Wiki

For PH registries, it is crucial to know if death was related to the study disease or not, in our case to pulmonary hypertension. This fact can be captured in the source dataset along with other causes of death, often as a flag value (i.e., PHREL or PAHREL equals to 'Y' or 1), whereas the granular cause of death is stored in a different column or table. Generally, it is worth carefully inspecting all the source tables for causes of death since they can be scattered across several tables. For example, in SDTM, cause of death can be found in Death Details domain and/or in Disposition Events with appropriate DSTERM, Adverse Events with AEOUT = 'FATAL', and Supplementary domains, i.e., SUPPDS, etc.

So in the ultimate case, a patient can have more than two causes of death (i.e., a relation to the PH and a granular condition resulting in death). Here we recommend adding as many records to the death table for a person as needed to keep all the details. The date of death, in this case, should be the same for all records for this patient.

Obviously, there is no reason for storing source records indicating only a fact of death without a reason for it if there is also a record with the reason. In such cases the latter should go into the CDM. Alternatively, if the only information available is that a particular patient died sometime, this should be taken into the CDM.