

How We Die - acdanger
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/06/22/how-we-die-in-one-chart/

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tokenadult
The New England Journal of Medicine has been running a series of articles with
historical perspective to celebrate its 200th anniversary. The article on
which this Washington Post blog post is based can be found here:

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

A full list of the anniversary articles can be found here:

[http://nejm200.nejm.org/explore/special-anniversary-
articles...](http://nejm200.nejm.org/explore/special-anniversary-articles/)

AFTER EDIT: some other comments posted here ask about reasons for changes
among the top ten causes of death. There has always been suicide in death
reports,

[http://www.nejm.org/action/showImage?doi=10.1056%2FNEJMp1113...](http://www.nejm.org/action/showImage?doi=10.1056%2FNEJMp1113569&iid=f01)

and suicide has long been one of the top-ten causes of death among YOUNG
people (who have a low death rate) in many countries. But indeed as more human
beings survive infectious diseases that kill in childhood or never catch those
diseases in the first place, they live long enough to be subject to more
deaths from suicide and from slow-developing diseases like heart disease and
cancer. The age distribution of mortality has changed immensely in the last
200 years, and that changes which causes of death show up as the top ten
causes.

~~~
excuse-me
Suicide reporting is highly sensitive to politics/society. In some
jurisdiction suicides under 18 were classified as accidents since minors
couldn't legally have made a conscious decision. in others cases were "given
the benefit of the doubt" to spare families

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aero142
I would be much more interested in a breakdown by age group with a
representation of how large a percent of the total that represents. It seems
to me that as we age, we have to die of something. I would be a lot more
interested in why we die young.

Edit: Here is something close [http://www.cdc.gov/Injury/wisqars/pdf/10LCD-
Age-Grp-US-2009-...](http://www.cdc.gov/Injury/wisqars/pdf/10LCD-Age-Grp-
US-2009-a.pdf)

~~~
excuse-me
The big change in death rate is due to stopping infectious diseases among
infants.

The causes of death among older people is trickier because of changes in
medical reporting procedures. Somebody who 50years ago would have died of "old
age" now has to have a reported cause of death.

Since the ultimate cause of death is stopping breathing/heart stopping - you
get a lot of cases of 90+year olds who die of pneumonia / heart failure. This
tends to get reported in the press as "massive rise in heart disease"

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aero142
Yes. This is exactly why I wasn't happy with the original. If people live to
be 90 and die of heart disease, that is a huge victory. In the chart I linked,
it shows that cancer and heart disease start being the number 1 and 2 killers
at 45-64, which seems like that is an important group to address. However, if
more people start making it to 95 and dying of "heart disease", we are
probably better off researching safer cars than cancer.

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shanecleveland
That's an interesting visualization. I have to assume that our increased
longevity and relatively fewer deaths due to infectious diseases is the reason
more people end up dying from cancer and heart disease?

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Dove
That was my thought as well. Notice that Alzheimer's also makes the list.

Of particular interest is that suicide is on the new list, and wasn't on the
old one. That says something about society, but I'm not exactly sure what.

~~~
maxerickson
They are top ten lists and three infectious diseases are eliminated from the
newer list.

So it is tough to draw any conclusions about suicide. This document suggests
the rate has fallen slightly since 1950:

<http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/hus/contents2011.htm#039>

(I wondered what the trend was and looked it up, I'm not involved in public
health or anything)

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mark-r
Seeing the breakdown from 1900 makes me very worried about the reports of TB
strains that can't be cured by any known antibiotic. E.G.
[http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/01/invincible-tb-
indi...](http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/01/invincible-tb-india/)

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ajross
This bit stood out to me as surprising: the rate of death to "accident" per
100k was 72 in 1900 and 38 in 2010. With all our modern technology and
regulation we're really only twice as safe?

I guess my suspicion is that the big contributor is auto accidents, which had
no analog in 1900 (and in any case, transportation accidents at muscle-powered
speeds were unlikely to be fatal). Still, my intuition had been that the world
used to be a more dangerous place than it was.

~~~
mynameishere
Autos and airplanes and the popularization of skiing, watersports, etc.

~~~
MattRogish
Mainline Commercial air travel (Delta, United, etc) hasn't killed anyone in a
while. It's one of the safest forms of transportation there is. Certainly a
lot safer than driving.

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mynameishere
I'm just saying that the average person has contact with dangerous machines on
a regular basis, compared with the past.

~~~
heretohelp
And they're just saying that it presents an immaterial risk compared to all
the other things people get killed by and so doesn't factor in.

Autos and airplanes just aren't comparable.

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kiba
I heard that if you eliminate all the microaccidents causes of death(cancer,
cardiovascular disease, alzheimer), we would be able to live 700 to 1000 years
and be in good health when we die.

Of course, death in the future might be more violent because that's the only
way to die. You might bled out, have your skull crushed, fall to your death,
get shot, committed suicide, or be murdered. It's pretty unpleasant, but the
alternative is getting old and unhealthy and then dying of cancer/heart
attack/neurological disease at the age of 80. I think I take my chance living
up to 700-1000 years in a 20 something body.

~~~
cstross
Only if you also eliminate senescence -- cells generally lose the ability to
divide over time, and a whole bunch of creeping malfunctions result in us
breaking down towards a limiting age of 114.

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lloeki
So, we each have 114 years to transform our bio-bodies into mechanical
machinery and/or our minds into digital ether.

We're becoming a holometabolous species. We just don't know how to become
beautiful, space-faring butterflies yet.

~~~
cstross
That process is probably a lot harder than you think, if you haven't studied
the biological sciences.

(Analogy: it's not like refactoring code in a high level language, it's like
reverse-engineering a heap of spaghetti-coded self-modifying assembly written
by a neural network _and designed to run simultaneously on several different
CPU architectures_ that have been glommed together in the same box. In other
words, it's nightmarishly difficult.)

114 years might suffice to do it. Or to demonstrate that it's a very
intractable problem (on the order of Fermat's last theorem) or to prove that
it's impossible. Meanwhile, for those of us who are already pushing fifty
(like me), it's probably already too late.

~~~
lloeki
You missed my point: I'm not saying that _from today_ we have 100+ years to
solve the problem, but that _once the problem is solved_ , a given human being
biological body will only be a transition.

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bsinger
I think it's interesting how accidents have decreased along with diseases. I
imagine it has something to do with better technology and regulations.

~~~
ap22213
I was actually surprised at how little it has changed relative to the amount
of safety regulations and technology. I always pictured the years around 1900
as being much more physically dangerous.

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excuse-me
What we saved by having hard hats at work and guards on machines - we lost by
you commuting an hour in your car without a seatbelt

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melvinmt
Death rate has dropped half in a century because of medical advances, but
cancer-related deaths have tripled - why?

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rauljara
Everyone dies eventually. The deaths that would have been from whatever is no
longer killing us are being taken over by something else that still does.

Or, another way to look at it: we are living long enough now that we have a
much better chance of contracting cancer during our lives.

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isalmon
It's frightening to see how the levels of suicide and Cancer went up comparing
to 1990. Suicide can be related to the level of stress in our modern world,
but what about cancer?

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zithtar
Cancer rates increase as life expectancy does.

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kwekly
I can appreciate why it took a while for the thought to die off that "brandy
drinking women" were prone to spontaneous combustion.

~~~
sreyaNotfilc
Speaking about Spontaneous Combustion, each time I hear about that I think of
3rd grade, when I read this...
<http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/2008/12/14>

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rwmj
"Doctors agreed that even a near miss by a cannonball — without contact —
could shatter bones, blind people, or even kill them."

How can a near miss of a cannonball shatter bones etc? Something to do with
air pressure?

~~~
excuse-me
In theory yes, although unlikely at cannonball velocities

There is/was an urban myth that the shock wave from the higher velocity rounds
introduced in the Vietnam era M16 could kill with a near miss - it's
essentialy impossible

