Cause of death

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In law, medicine, and statistics, cause of death is an official determination of the conditions resulting in a human's death, which may be recorded on a death certificate. A cause of death is determined by a medical examiner. In rare cases, an autopsy needs to be performed by a pathologist. The cause of death is a specific disease or injury, in contrast to the manner of death, which is a small number of categories like "natural", "accident", "suicide", and "homicide", each with different legal implications.^[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]