Alberto Palloni, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Guido Pinto-Aguirre, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Hiram Beltrán-Sánchez, Community Health Sciences, Fielding School of Public Health & California Center for Population Research, UCLA

The Latin American Mortality Database (LAMBdA) was originally created to support the empirical study of the history of mortality trends in Latin American countries after independence.  It now supports the study of very recent mortality trends and is particularly suited for the study of old age mortality during the post-WWII period. The database covers the interval between 1848 and 2014, it includes population censuses, age-specific (five year and single year age groups) total death counts (starting in 1900), and by causes of deaths (starting in 1945).  It contains over 170 years of data including adjusted life tables (about 500 life tables).

Adjustments are of two types: (a) for relative completeness of death counts and (b) for adult age misstatement.  The adjustment procedures were chosen from a battery of 10-12 techniques that proved to be optimal (in the sense of mean squared error reduction) in extensive simulations that reproduced known or suspected sources of errors in the data. These adjustments are applied consistently across countries and years of observation. The resulting data are optimized for intertemporal and intercountry comparability. Please read the overview and the methods section for more details about the adjustments and the data.

The Latin American Mortality Database is provided free of charge to all individuals who register to the site. Please do not pass your copy of these data to other users; instead, refer them to the LAMBdA website where they can download the data for themselves. The database will continue to be updated and augmented with new data and products that will enhance the continuous study of mortality in these countries.

Acknowledgment:

This project is supported by the National Institute on Aging via research project grants (R01 AG016209 [PREHCO], R03 AG015673, R01 AG018016, and MERIT award R37 AG025216), by a Fogarty International Center award for Global Research Training in Population Health (D43 TW001586), and by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD, R24-HD041022). The University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers are supported by core grants to the Center for Demography and Ecology, University of Wisconsin (R24 HD047873) and to the Center for Demography of Health and Aging, University of Wisconsin (P30 AG017266). The UCLA researcher is grateful to the California Center for Population Research at UCLA (CCPR) for general support. CCPR receives population research infrastructure funding (R24-HD041022) from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD).

© 2014 Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System