Sudden deaths by age in 2022

​FOI REF: FOI/2023/4865

You asked

I would like to know the number of sudden deaths in 2022 and the age of those who died.

I would also like to know when the government will look into Sudden deaths.

I would also like to know what the government thinks Sudden deaths are related to? E.g. The cause of it.

I would also like to know what our scientists think is the cause of sudden deaths rising in the UK.

We said

​Thank you for your enquiry.

We are responsible for producing mortality statistics for England and Wales, this is driven by information collected from the death certificate at death registration.

For Scotland and Northern Ireland statistics please contact National Records Scotland and NISRA respectively.

ONS is a Non-Ministerial Department reporting to Parliament. This means that we are part of the Civil Service but independent of political decisions. We decide what to publish about any subject based on a combination of factors: our legal obligations, the availability of data, what has been published before, our knowledge of the subject, and contacts with numerous stakeholders including academic researchers, government and local authority policymakers, Members of Parliament, the media, and interested members of the public. Sometimes government departments ask us to look into particular questions, but in most cases, they don't exercise any control over what we publish as a result of the research. We have no links or funding from private individuals. ONS may conduct analysis relating to sudden deaths in the future, should there be a public demand for this data.

For more information, please see the following link to the Code of Practice for Statistics on the website of the UK Statistics Authority.

Published mortality data relating to sudden deaths

All of the conditions mentioned on the death certificate are coded using the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision (ICD-10). From all these causes, an underlying cause of death is selected using ICD-10 coding rules. The underlying cause of death is defined by World Health Organisation (WHO) as:

a) the disease or injury that initiated the train of events directly leading to death, or

b) the circumstances of the accident or violence that produced the fatal injury

The ICD-10 codes are:

• Sudden Adult Death Syndrome is R96
• Cardiac Arrythmia I49.9
• Sudden Cardiac Death I46.1
• Instantaneous deaths R96.0

We have not yet conducted analysis of deaths due to Adult Sudden Death Syndrome for 2022 by age group. 2022 data is still in provisional format to allow the inclusion of late registrations, which are deaths referred for Coroner investigation.  This analysis will be published in July 2023 on our NOMIS Webservice and as part of the 21st Century Mortality dataset.

However, if you would like to obtain this information sooner, we can provide this as a bespoke request for you using provisional data. User requested data sets are subject to disclosure control, legal frameworks, resources and agreement to costs under the ONS Charging policy. If you would like to discuss this further, or to obtain a quote for this work please contact the Health Analysis and Pandemic Insight (HAPI) Customer Service team at Health.Data@ons.gov.uk.

In case it is of interest, we have produced a previous user request on this topic, which includes provisional 2022 data showing the number of deaths due to sudden adult death syndrome of people aged 16 and over. This is the accessible via the following link: Deaths "involving" or "due to" Sudden Infant Death Syndrome and Sudden Adult Death Syndrome.

Age group data up to 2021 can be extracted using our NOMIS webservice. This shows deaths registered with the sudden death causes age group for our most up to date and finalised period (2021).

The associated download named 'Sudden deaths numbers by age.xlsx' has been extracted from NOMIS. This provides deaths registered in England and Wales where ICD-10 R96, I49.9 and I46.1 is the underlying cause of death.

Total mortality shows deaths registered in England and Wales including non-residents. Non-Residents figures are included, which can be subtracted if just England and Wales data are required.