It's unwise to use data from old issues of Heart and Stroke Statistical Update to construct mortality trends. A death rate is a ratio between mortality and population. This is the most widely used measure for determining the overall health of a community. We compare mortality for a given disease to the affected population to evaluate mortality trends. National death rates are usually computed per 100,000 population.
Crude rates are simply the ratio of total deaths to total population for any given year.
A more meaningful and informative death rate is the specific rate . It lets you look at well-defined subgroups of the total population. Age-adjusted rates are used mainly to compare the rates of two or more specific communities, or the nation as a whole, over time. Age-adjusting gets rid of fluctuations in the data due to differences in the age distribution of the population. However, statistics based on both the 1940 and 2000 standards are given.