Czech mortality patterns: the past, the present, and regional dissimilarities

Abstract

In the interwar period, life expectancy at birth in the Czech Republic was close to the levels observed in France. After the World War II, three dissimilar stages in the development of life expectancy at birth became apparent in the Czech Republic: 1. between World War II and the mid-1960s characterized by mortality decrease; 2. from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, showing the deterioration of the survival rate; and 3) from the mid-1980s or the beginning of the 1990s to the present with a reappearance of a new decline in mortality. The recent improvements in the survival rate have been primarily due to the reduction of mortality from circulatory diseases and at older ages. Significantly diverse cause-of-death profiles were found in the Ostrava, Zlín, Karlovy Vary and the Central Bohemia regions, with similar deviations for both sexes in 1994-1997.