An important limitation was the use of
the NHANES III linked mortality public-use
file including limited mortality information
compared with the restricted-use files and
having small perturbations for a small, selected
number of records. However, a comparative
analysis of the NHANES III public- and
restricted-use linked mortality files conducted
by the National Center for Health Statistics
suggests that the results obtained from these
2 data sets were very similar for all-cause and
selected cause---specific mortality.