Reported co-infection deaths are more common in early adulthood and among similar infections

E. C. Griffiths, A. B. Pedersen, A. Fenton, O. L. Petchey

Many people have multiple infections at the same time, but the combined contribution of those infections to disease-related mortality is unknown. Registered causes of death offer a unique opportunity to study associations between multiple infections. We analysed over 900,000 death certificates that reported infectious causes of death. We tested whether reports of multiple infections (i.e., co-infections) differed across individuals' age or sex. We also tested whether each pair of infections were reported together more or less often than expected by chance, and whether this co-reporting was associated with the number of biological characteristics they had in common. In England and Wales, and the USA, 10 and 6 % respectively of infection-related deaths involved co-infection. Co-infection was reported reported most often in young adults; 30 % of infection-related deaths among those aged 25-44 from the USA, and 20 % of infection-related deaths among those aged 30-39 from England and Wales, reported multiple infections. The proportion of infection-related deaths involving co-infection declined with age more slowly in males than females, to less than 10 % among those aged >65. Most associated pairs of infections co-occurred more often than expected from their frequency of being reported alone (488/683 [71 %] in the USA, 129/233 [55 %] in England and Wales), and tended to share biological characteristics (taxonomy, transmission mode, tropism or timescale). Age, sex, and biologically similar infections are associated with death from co-infection, and may help indicate patients at risk of severe co-infection.