The paper presents the brief review on the trend in causes of death and examines the distributions of age at death to estimate the parameters of their distributions applied to Weibull distribution model. In applying the ages at death by cause the equivalence of concepts from reliability analysis is used for the risk assessment. Graphical method is applied to estimate the parameters of distribution by cumulative hazard plotting. Then the characteristics of Weibull distribution are considered in interpretations through multiple decrement life tables. Also this paper investigates the life table by cause of death applying the current cause of death structure to the 1978-79 life table of Korean and the gains of life expectancy by eliminating each cause.
The materials are all classifiable death data, 114, 753 cases of male and 77, 029 cases of female, which are from 1986 Cause of Death Statistics published by National Bureau of Statistics, Economic Planning Board of Korea. The basic informations are ages at death with corresponding cause and probabilities of dying in the life table system.
The causes of death analyzed belong to one of 8 categories l Infectious and Parasitic Diseases (001-139 ; designated as Infectious Diseases), Malignant Neoplasms (140-208), Hypertensive Diseases (401-405), Ischemic Heart Diseases, Deseases of Pulmonary Circulation and Other Forms of Heart Diseases (410-429 ; designated as Heart Diseases), Cerebrovascular Diseases (430-438), Chronic Liver Diseases (571 ; designated as Liver Diseases), Injury and Poisoning (800-999) and all other diseases
The major findings are as follows :
1. Applying the ages at death to the Weibull Distribution scale parameters are 68.43 in male and 97.77 in female and shape parameters are 1.19 in male and 1.04 in female.
2. The proportions of cumulative hazard rates of each to all causes present that the causes of death could be classified to increasing and parasitic diseases and the latter includes malignant neoplasms , cerebrovascular diseases, hypertensive diseases and liver diseases.
3. The life expectancy could be most prolonged by elimination of malignant neoplasms as cause of death by 3.31 years in male and 1.97 years in female respectively.
UnJury and poisoning also contribute the considerable gains in life expectancy at birth especially in male by being eliminated but the relative gains are decreased with age.
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