International Journal of Epidemiology © International Epidemiological Association 1989 Vol. 18,No.3 (SuppI1)

In the WHO MONICA Project mortality and morbidity from acute myocardial infarction is being monitored in 39 Collaborating Centres in 26 countries for a period of 10years. The myocardial infarction registration procedures have been standardized and suspect coronary events are classified into diagnostic categories according to common criteria. This paper presents ischaemic heart disease mortality figures, based on routine statistics forthe study populations and discusses cross-sectional comparability of morbidity data from event registration. Because of differences in avail-ability of data used for diagnostic classification of events (such as autopsy data) the proportions of different diagnostic categories vary from centre to centre. There are, therefore, problems in cross-sectional comparison of morbidity data between the centres. The primary target of event registration in the project is to monitor morbidity changes within centres during the ten-year period. This goal should not be affected by the problems described in this paper. Mortality data have been used extensively in cardio-vascular disease (CVD) epidemiology to assess the magnitude of the coronary heart disease (CHD) prob-lem and the changes in disease frequency over time in a community. A major difficulty with the use of mor-tality statistics, however, is that they do not giv