Hysterectomy prevalence and death rates for cervical cancer--United States, 1965-1988.

Since the 1960s, hysterectomy has been one of the most frequently performed inpatient surgical procedures in the United States, with an estimated 33% of women undergoing a hysterectomy by 60 years of age. However, rates of cervical cancer mortality that do not allow for the proportion of women with hysterectomies in the population will underestimate the rates in the true at-risk population (i.e., women with intact uteri) and may influence apparent secular trends in rates of cervical cancer mortality. This report uses national mortality and hospital-discharge data to compare death rates, corrected and uncorrected for hysterectomy prevalence, for women who died with an underlying diagnosis of cervical cancer (International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision [ICD-9] and ICD-9-Clinical Modification, code 180).