Russian Short-Term Mortality Fluctuations Data Series as a new tool for population health and mortality research in Russia

On October 24, 2023, the staff of theInternational Laboratory for Population and Health presented a new tool for research in health and mortality of the Russian population: the Russian Database of Short-term Mortality Fluctuations, created within the framework of the project "Monitoring and Forecasting of Life Expectancy Based on Current Statistics"

 

From April 1 to October 31, 2023, the laboratory’s staff has been carrying out the project "Monitoring and Forecasting of Life Expectancy Based on Operational Statistics Data", which was supported at the competition of projects of young researchers, postgraduates and students of the HSE on Scientific, Technological and Socio-Economic Forecasting 2023, organised by the Strategic Project 'National Centre of Science, Technology and Socio-Economic Foresight'.

Despite the fact that scientists have already known about seasonal changes in mortality for a long time, the increased interest in the study of short-term mortality fluctuations occurred after the start of the coronavirus pandemic in February-March 2020. The first step for researchers was to collect the weekly number of deaths. So, in May 2020, the Short-term Mortality Fluctuations Database (STMF) was launched as part of the Human Mortality Database (HMD). The STMF contains weekly numbers of deaths in broad age groups for the represented countries. This database also includes a tool for data visualisation, in particular of excess mortality with the option to choose a baseline mortality level calculated by different methodology.

As a result of the project "Monitoring and Forecasting of Life Expectancy Based on Current Statistics", a team of International Laboratory created a new tool for analysing health and mortality in Russia: The Russian Database of Short-term Mortality Fluctuations (RuSTMF) based on depersonalised individual death registration data for 2000-2021. RuSTMF contains weekly crude and standardised mortality rates from 2000 to 2021 for 83 regions of Russia and Russia as a whole. In addition, an online instrument for visualisation of data from RuSTMF with similar functionality was developed based on the open source STMF visualisation toolkit.

At the seminar, Dmitry Zhdanov, chief research fellow, and Alexey Shchur, research fellow, presented the methods of baseline mortality level estimation, informed the participants about the possibilities and limitations of the STMF and the RuSTMF and the online tools for visualisation of these data.

​​Dmitry Jdanov's presentation on methods for estimating the baseline mortality and excess mortality can be found here (In English).

Aleksey Shchur's presentation about new database can be found here (In Russian).

The Russian Database of Short-term Mortality Fluctuations: https://demogr.hse.ru/russtmf

RuSTMF online visualisation: https://mlinz.shinyapps.io/RosBKS/