[1] 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] A study published in Preventing Chronic Disease found that only one-third of New York City resident physicians reported believing that the present system of documentation was accurate.
Half reported the inability to record "what they felt to be the correct cause of death", citing reasons such as technical limitation and instruction to "put something else".
Public perception of the relative risk of death by various causes is biased by personal experience and by media coverage.
This is the proposed mechanism for the observed increase in the death rate due to cardiac arrest after widely experienced acutely stressful events such as terrorism, military attacks, and natural disasters (even among those who are not in the affected area) and for documented deaths in muggings and other frightening events which caused no traumatic physical harm.