
Why we Die - Grovara123
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=longevity-why-we-die-global-life-expectancy
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krigath
'The article starts "A baby born in the U.S. this year is likely to live to
blow out 78 birthday candles . . . " That would mean he or she would make it
to age 12.'

I like this comment :)

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Stefan_H
Even if you take 78 birthday candles to mean reach the age of 78, then there
is still an issue with that statement. Likely to reach the age of 78 implies
that the median age is 78, not the average. The median age is likely different
than 78 (my guess is lower due to the distribution being skewed left - but
that is just a guess)

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sskates
A left skew would imply that the median is to the right of the mean.

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Stefan_H
I totally mean skewed right. The big part of the curve is on the left.

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amelim
Seems to be more of a "How we die" rather than why, but regardless it's a well
done visualization.

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pathdependent
It was a "well done visual," and does put some things into perspective. For
example, the "War on Cancer" began in about 1971. While I'm optimistic about
the near-term future in cancer treatment, the chart doesn't reflect much
historic clinical success.

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thisisnotmyname
I'd encourage a different interpretation of the data: Cancer holding steady
actually is an improvement.

Everyone is guaranteed to die of something, and the longer you live the
likelihood of that something being cancer greatly increases. So as people
shift away from other categories, i.e. heart disease and childbirth, and live
longer, they're going to shift towards the cancer category. I'm actually
amazed that cancer hasn't gone up significantly.

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pathdependent
This is a very good point. Although the data (at this link) are not isolated,
using a GUI window as a ruler, you can see a clear decrease, just not a
visually compelling one. And yes, I agree that as you reduce the mortality
associated with other diseases, getting cancer becomes more likely.

What would be more interesting to see, in this particular context, is the
mortality associated with different disease groups for different age cohorts.
For example, how has the treatment for cancer progressed for people between 40
and 50, rather than all cohorts at once.

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seandbarrett
The yellow band is also getting eaten from below by the blue (presumably AIDS
deaths?).

US median age grew by about 2 years per decade between 1990-2000 so that also
supports thisisnotmyname's point.

Some of the decline may be due to lifestyle changes (e.g. lung cancer has
probably peaked in the US) but there has also been dramatic progress in
treatment for some cancers (Breast, testicular, Hodkin's).

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pathdependent
Agreed.

Also, some of the recent treatment modalities are genuinely revolutionary. For
example, Gleevec (subsequently exposed problems aside) is pretty damn amazing.
Obviously, new things are becoming possible because of a long-growing body of
research. The question is whether we have reached the tipping point. As I said
previously, I'm optimistic -- I think we have. That being said, cancer is
_fucking complex_ and even if we were at some tipping point, progress is
measured in years and decades, not weeks as the breathless popsci articles
always seem to imply.

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abruzzi
I saw a presentation from an evolutionary biologist who may the point that we
die because there is no evolutionary pressure not to die. Once we've birthed
and raised out young, we are no longer relevant from an evolutionary
perspective. He tested this with fruit flies by separating the young by gender
for increasingly longer periods of time effectively delaying breeding so only
the longer lived specimens could live to breed. By doing that over many
generations, I believe he tripled the life expectancy of his test group.

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philwelch
You don't have to go into biology to explain why we die; the physics is
sufficient. Everything is subject to entropy.

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jlgreco
There are plenty of examples of (admitted, simpler than humans) organisms
which are effectively "immortal". The heat death of the universe will get them
all, but human mortality is nevertheless a good deal more complicated than
just entropy.

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philwelch
Right, so the question is why we die _when_ we die, not why we die at all.

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dmm
We die because we are born.

"Our birth and death are just one thing. You can't have one without the other
.It's a little funny to see how at a death people are so tearful and sad, and
at a birth how happy and delighted. It's delusion .I think if you really want
to cry. Then it would be better to do so when someone born. Cry at the root,
for if there were no birth, there would be no death. Can you understand this?"

-Ajahn Chah

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firefoxman1
Dying is one of the most important things a person can do. I was in the
airport last week sitting near a little fog-tornado machine and guess which
age group was curious enough to go over to it and mess with it? Only the kids.
The grumpy old men were angrily waiting for their flight, the stressed-out
moms telling their kids to be quiet, and all the people my age were mesmerized
by their phones.

Over time we get too world-weary and cynical. How many innovative startups
that push us forward are started by people over 50, or even 40 for that
matter?

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lincolnq
How much value -- how many stories, how many glimmers-of-an-idea, how many
things-I-learned-growing-up-in-the-thirties are lost when an old person dies?

I wouldn't wish death on a single person.

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firefoxman1
> _I wouldn't wish death on a single person._

I wouldn't either. I hope I didn't imply that. And the "grumpy old men" are
just a stereotype I often see. My grandfather, for example, is _the_ happiest
(and wisest) man I know. But he isn't going to go start a company tomorrow
that will revolutionise the way we communicate.

Can you really deny that the curiosity that children have is essential to
society moving forward and staying youthful, and has to always be replenished?

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mahyarm
I really think the reason why grumpy old men are grumpy is because they don't
have the energy and capable bodies of youth. I think a 70 year old with the
body and hormones of a healthy 20 year old will still party like it's the 60s.

Mental scar tissue is another issue too.

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kenjackson
The data here seems to fly in the face of another story on HN (a week or two
ago) that suggested that the increase in life expectancy was almost completely
from reducing infant/child mortality. This data shows a very different story.

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elmarks
Both can still be true.

The majority of people do not die as children, but the effect of those who do
is disproportionately large on "life expectancy" because it's an average.

Let's say that 23% of children die in their first year (true in Sweden in
1751). Let's say everyone else dies at 80. Life expectancy is 61.6 years.

Now let's say time passes and now 0.2% of children die in their first year
(true in Sweden today) and everyone else dies at 80. Life expectancy is now
79.7 years. It jumped over 18 years (30%) with no one living any longer than
before. Additionally, the percentage of children dying was never even 1/4 of
the total, so the vast majority of people still died from other causes.

The point is that the linked chart represents numeric percentages of people
dying, while life expectancy weights younger years much more heavily.

Most of the progress that has been made in life expectancy is from young
children, but most of the progress in "what actually kills people" has been
for older people.

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kenjackson
On phone... Short reply. Life expectancy since 40 increased at a rate
comparable to expectancy since birth. That is, we've made huge gains in
keeping ppl alive even starting from age 40.

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shwonkbc
"A baby born in the U.S. this year is likely to live to blow out 78 birthday
candles."

Considering you blow out a candle for each year since you were born every
birthday, I think they just said that we're all going to live until age 12.

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xbryanx
How hard is it for them to make the key colors match the graph colors? They're
off by quite a bit and it makes this chart very difficult for my eyes to
parse.

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fragsworth
Not just that, but I'm really sick of these stacked graphs where data floats
on top of other data. It makes the image "prettier" at the expense of being
harder to read. It makes it extremely difficult to compare the trends for the
graph lines floating on the top of all the others, because they're moving all
over the fucking place.

Why not just start all the graph lines from the bottom? If you really need the
total, just have it be its own line?

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quarterto
What is that bump in worldwide deaths around 1985?

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libria
I think the bump you're referring to is 1996. A World Bank sourced Life
Expectancy chart[1] seems to indicate problems in both South Africa in general
and the economic depression in Russia coincide roughly with that time period.

//edit: Events in Korea, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Congo caused dips as well. I
guess the next question (and an interesting one) would be if there was a human
condition of some sort that unified these different situations.

[1] [http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&#...</a>

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astrofinch
IMO, too much money is being spent attacking the proximate causes of death
(cancer, heart disease, etc.) but not enough is being spent attacking the root
cause: aging. Yeah, if we cure cancer then life expectancy will go up some.
But those who would have died of cancer are still going to grow older, become
weak, and die of _something_. It seems like a more efficient use of resources
to fight aging than to fight all the problems it causes individually.

<http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html>

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pbw
Reduced mortality from heart disease seems to account for essentially all the
mortality reduction. How are we reducing deaths so much in the face of rising
obesity, etc.?

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tptacek
Statins are probably one major reason.

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rosser
I don't disagree that they're probably a major contributor, but the first
statin came on the market in 1987 (Mevacor, by Merck), and the line is well on
the down-slope by that point. In fact, more than half its drop (for US data)
comes _before_ that point.

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orzuk
Smoking rates have declined significantly since the 60's

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orzuk
Something in the charts doesn't make sense to me. Death rates per 100,000 are
about 1.5x higher in 'global' vs. 'U.S.', yet life expectancy for 'global' and
'U.S.' is almost the same. Any explanations?

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alphaBetaGamma
Something seems wrong: 1e5 /(deaths per 1e5) should be about equal to the life
expectancy. But the drop in deaths per 1e5 is much bigger than the increase in
life expectancy.

Am I missing something, or is the data SNAFU?

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tokenadult
The charts show plainly that either in the United States, or in OECD countries

[http://www.oecd.org/general/listofoecdmembercountries-
ratifi...](http://www.oecd.org/general/listofoecdmembercountries-
ratificationoftheconventionontheoecd.htm)

as a whole, life expectancy is going up throughout the human age span. Life
expectancy at birth is up quite a lot over the decades shown in the charts,
but life expectancy at ages 40, 60, 65, and 80 have also increased.

The New England Journal of Medicine has a free access article from earlier
this year (to celebrate its 200th anniversary)

<http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1113569>

with much information on changes in mortality in the United States over the
last two centuries.

The current prediction by demographers who specialize in life expectancy
research is that a girl born after the year 2000 in a developed country has a
50:50 chance of personally living to the age of 100.

[http://www.demogr.mpg.de/en/projects_publications/publicatio...](http://www.demogr.mpg.de/en/projects_publications/publications_1904/journal_articles/broken_limits_to_life_expectancy_1022.htm)

[http://www.prb.org/Journalists/Webcasts/2010/humanlongevity....](http://www.prb.org/Journalists/Webcasts/2010/humanlongevity.aspx)

[http://www.demogr.mpg.de/en/projects_publications/publicatio...](http://www.demogr.mpg.de/en/projects_publications/publications_1904/journal_articles/biodemography_of_human_ageing_3811.htm)

(I'm glad for that news on my daughter's behalf.) That's based on steady
improvement in mortality and morbidity outcomes across the age span in those
countries, and what can reasonably be expected simply from more thorough
provision of existing preventive treatments and treatments of acute and
chronic diseases. Already it is hard for twenty-first century Americans to
remember that once even kings and queens had many children die in early
childhood from communicable diseases, and someday it will be difficult to
remember that children ever died from much besides volitional human behavior
(accidents, suicide, or homicide), with even those causes of death being in
decline.

AFTER EDIT:

Several of the other comments in this thread refer to cancer mortality rates.
An excellent article by a cancer researcher, "Why haven’t we cured cancer
yet?"

[http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/why-havent-
we-...](http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/why-havent-we-cured-
cancer-yet/)

which was submitted to HN when it was first put on the Web, discusses the
several reasons why cancer mortality has declined only a little over the last
few decades, despite much research devoted to finding more effective
treatments for cancer and preventive measures against cancer.

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machrider
When you switch from US to Global, the lifespans all stay roughly the same, or
go up a bit. Yet the deaths per 100,000 in practically all categories go _way_
up. How does this make sense?

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gloryless
1\. We die because we accept it. 2\. < dramatic pause > 3\. ???? 4\.
Enlightenment

