Contribution of 10th Revision of the International Classification of Diseases to the Coding of Medico-Legal Mortality

Background: Tunisian official mortality reports do not include causes of medico-legal death. Aims: Establish the medico-legal death statistics of Northern Tunisia according to the 10th version of the International Classification of Diseases ( ICD-10 ). Methods: A cross-sectional descriptive review, including all medico-legal deaths investigated in Northern Tunisia in 2015. Data related to the sociodemographic features were collected. Causes and manner of death were coded according to the ICD-10. Results: We included 1957 cases. Victims were mainly males. Sex ratio ( M/F ) was 3.5 with a mean age of 47.2 +/- 20.6 years. Violent death represented 57.4% of the total sample, diseases of the circulatory system and of the respiratory systems counted respectively for 24.5% and 6.5%. Road traffic accidents were the cause of 56.1% of accidental deaths. Hanging was the most frequent suicidal mode ( 51.5% ). Homicides were most frequently caused by sharp force ( 35.8% ). Conclusion: ICD-10 was a useful tool to code medico legal death and to highlight violent death causes in the population mortality report in Northern Tunisia. This would be helpful to enable a standardization of autopsy reports aligned with a public health use of these data.