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In law, medicine, and statistics, cause of death is an official determination of the conditions resulting in a human 's death, which may be recorded on a death certificate. A cause of death is determined by a medical examiner. In rare cases, an autopsy needs to be performed by a pathologist. The cause of death is a specific disease or injury ...
A death certificate is either a legal document issued by a medical practitioner which states when a person died, or a document issued by a government civil registration office, that declares the date, location and cause of a person's death, as entered in an official register of deaths. An official death certificate is usually required to be ...
Manner of death. In many legal jurisdictions, the manner of death is a determination, typically made by the coroner, medical examiner, police, or similar officials, and recorded as a vital statistic. Within the United States and the United Kingdom, a distinction is made between the cause of death, which is a specific disease or injury, versus ...
Even for these deaths, the comparability of findings on the leading causes of death is affected by variation in certification skills among physicians, the diagnostic and pathological data available at the time of completing a death certificate, variations in medical culture in choosing the underlying cause, and legal and institutional ...
Clinical death. Clinical death is the medical term for cessation of blood circulation and breathing, the two criteria necessary to sustain the lives of human beings and of many other organisms. [1] It occurs when the heart stops beating in a regular rhythm, a condition called cardiac arrest. The term is also sometimes used in resuscitation ...
The causes listed are relatively immediate medical causes, but the ultimate cause of death might be described differently. For example, tobacco smoking often causes lung disease or cancer , and alcohol use disorder can cause liver failure or a motor vehicle accident .
Vital statistics generally distinguish specific injuries and diseases as cause of death, from general categories like homicide, accident, and death by natural causes as manner of death. Both are listed in this category, as are both proximal and root causes of death. An injury that could be fatal is called major trauma; see also Category:Injuries.
The Mortality Medical Data System ( MMDS) is used to automate the entry, classification, and retrieval of cause-of-death information reported on death certificates throughout the United States and in many other countries. The National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) began the system's development in 1967.