Cause of death
Medical, legal, and statistical determination / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For a comprehensive list of potential causes, see List of causes of death by rate.
For other uses, see Cause of death (disambiguation).
Not to be confused with Manner of death.
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, in contrast to the manner of death, which is a small number of categories like "natural", "accident", "suicide", and "homicide", each with different legal implications.[1]
![]() | The examples and perspective in this article deal primarily with the United States and do not represent a worldwide view of the subject. (May 2014) |
International Classification of Disease (ICD) codes can be used to record manner and cause of death in a systematic way that makes it easy to compile statistics and more feasible to compare events across jurisdictions.[2]