What Will Kill You?

You're going to die. What will kill you? And when?

Heart disease. In your late seventies. So don't say we didn't warn you.

We worked through some interesting mortality data at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control's National Center for Health Statistics, and created some charts to illustrate causes of death by age.

This first shows both the exponential increase in mortality with age, and the relative importance of different causes of death. Cancer is the leading cause of death from 45-74, after which heart diseases take over (click on any of these images to open them in a new window):

From 25 to 85, your risk of death in a given year approximately doubles every decade you're alive. 433 out of 100,000 45-54 year olds die in a year, but for 55-64 year olds it's 940 / 100,000, and the risk more than doubles for 65-74 year olds, to 2,255 / 100,000.

Looking at how causes of death compare to each other, what stands out is how increasingly deadly heart diseases are as one gets older. Every year it kills 92 / 100,000 45-54 year olds, but 1,611 / 100,000 75-84 year olds:

Heart disease isn't the only cause of death that spikes nonlinearly with advanced age. So do cerebrovascular disease (stroke), Alzheimer's, influenza, and the unhelpful "all other." Cancer risk increases with each decade, but does not exhibit the dramatic late-life jump of those others.

One bit of good news: if you're 55-64, when other death risks are increasing, your risk of death by accident is at a lifetime low.

There are positive trends in this data (although when you're dead, that doesn't help much). In two generations, mortality rates for 45-64 year olds have improved dramatically. According to this summary of NCHS data:

Since 1950 mortality among adults age 45–64 years has decreased by 49 percent overall, to 648 deaths per 100,000 population in 2000. During this period death rates for heart disease, stroke, and unintentional injury decreased while cancer mortality rose slowly through the 1980s and then declined.

... During the past 50 years mortality among persons 65 years of age and over has dropped by 35 percent to 5,169 deaths per 100,000 population in 2000. During this period death rates for heart disease and stroke have declined sharply while the death rate for cancer rose until 1995 and has since decreased slightly.

The result: longer life. We found data here going back decades; you can see that in 1935, if you made it to 65 (an iffy prospect), you only had a 20% chance to make it to 85. By 2015 it's projected that more than 50% of people who make it to 65 will have two more decades ahead of them.

So eat right, exercise, and be positive ... we all know we'll show up in the CDC mortality data some day, but try to push that as far into the future as possible!

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Here is a pdf of the data for the charts above. Our source for the data is this page at the Centers for Disease Control / National Center for Health Statistics.