Exploring spatial patterns of mortality: The new Atlas of United States Mortality

The National Center for Health Statistics, CDC, has produced an Atlas of Un ited States Mortality which includes maps of rates for the leading causes o f death in the United States for the period 1988-1992. As part of this proj ect, many aspects of statistical mapping have been re-examined to maximize the atlas's effectiveness in conveying accurate mortality patterns to epide miologists and public health practitioners. Because recent cognitive resear ch demonstrated that no one map style is optimal for answering many differe nt map questions, maps and graphs of several different mortality statistics are included for each cause of death. New mixed effects models were develo ped to provide predicted rates and improved variance estimates. Results fro m these models were smoothed using a weighted head-banging algorithm to pro duce maps of general spatial trends free of background noise. Maps of White female lung cancer rates from the new atlas are presented here to illustra te how this innovative combination of maps and graphs permits greater explo ration of the underlying mortality data than is possible from previous sing le-map atlas designs. Published in 1999 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. This art icle is a U.S. Government work and is in the public domain in the United St ates.