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Blazinghand
United States25550 Posts
After reading an interesting article on sugary drinks, I was reading through recent CDC statistics reports published by the National Center for Health Statistics (website here). I came across this recent National Vital Statistics Report (pdf here) on causes of death broken down by age, race, and sex, and I was somewhat surprised by the results. I'll share my thoughts as a young person as well as the big highlight here.
These statistics gathered by a US Government agency from US Residents, so this might not be interesting to those of you living in other countries.
Age and Death By Accident
In all age groups from birth to age 44, the #1 cause of death was "Accident". This isn't due to an upsurge of mafia activity, either. This is the most recent CDC analysis, using data gathered throughout 2007.
Here's a selection of the raw data:
#1 Cause of death, by age:
+ Show Spoiler +1-4 years: Accidents (33.8%)
5-9 years: Accidents (35.6%)
10-14 years: Accidents (35.8%)
15-19 years: Accidents (48.8%)
20-24 years: Accidents (45.5%)
25-34 years: Accidents (35.2%)
35-44 years: Accidents (21.3%)
44+ years: Disease (at first cancer, then heart disease)
In Young Adults, such as Assault (homicide) and Intentional Self Harm (suicide) are less than but still substantial fractions of the amount of deaths caused by Accident (unintentional injuries). Disease is a distant "also-ran" in this race.
I hadn't really considered it, but living in a 1st-world country, I am far more likely to die while hiking or driving my car than I am due to disease, (even suicide and homicide far outweigh the chance of dying due to disease), and yet still there are people my age who drink and drive, or, as bad, are driven by those who drink and drive. If I die young, it will likely be by my own hand, by that of another, or by accident. Sickness is rare.
Accidents come from a lot of sources, too. Sometimes it is, as I suggested, due to drunk driving. But you can also die while swimming, or due to overexertion, or even heat stroke. You could die while biking, or because you have a firearm in the house, by falling drunkenly into your pool, or for any other number of accidental reasons.
It's also true that the reason that young deaths are mostly die via accident is that young people are healthy and generally don't die to disease. Those of us in the developed nations that do get sick tend not to die, and those of us that die anyways make up a small portion of the population. It's only as we age that disease becomes more deadly than accidents, in part due to fewer accidents, but also due to more susceptibility to disease.
Knowing this, I don't feel particularly more paranoid about life; a lot of risk factors I avoid on a regular basis (I don't always drink beer, but when I do I drink dos equis have a designated driver; I follow safety regulations and wear my seatbelt; there are no loaded firearms stored in my home), and those that I can't avoid entirely I mitigate when possible. But I can't go avoiding every circumstance in life that could kill me-- or else I might not have a life worth living. I'm still a young reckless dude who speeds (a little!) on the freeway, likes to go hiking in places where there are bears, and generally lives life in an enjoyable way. It's a decision I make, to risk a little for a pretty acceptable benefit.
In the end, I'm not sure whether this block of statistics has changed my outlook on life. I wonder if this is even meant to? It's a lot harder to look at something intellectual and change the way I think, even if I think I'm doing so, than it is to have an emotional feeling about how the world works and act on that. 
How about you, ladies and gentlemen? Thoughts on causes of death for young people, or perhaps on the nature of changing the way you live?
  
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You shouldn't take precautions specifically to avoid death it'll just lower your DPS.
If you start taking dmg just pick-up and drop on the low ground to heal up. NP.
User was warned for this post
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Blazinghand
United States25550 Posts
On September 02 2011 07:39 ChinaLifeXXL wrote:
You shouldn't take precautions specifically to avoid death it'll just lower your DPS.
If you start taking dmg just pick-up and drop on the low ground to heal up. NP.
Drop micro is too apm intensive, which is why i prefer to stustustustutterstep micro. I don't like using too many stimpacks though I heard they're bad for life expectancy
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Baltimore, USA22251 Posts
On September 02 2011 07:30 Blazinghand wrote:In the end, I'm not sure whether this block of statistics has changed my outlook on life. I wonder if this is even meant to? It's a lot harder to look at something intellectual and change the way I think, even if I think I'm doing so, than it is to have an emotional feeling about how the world works and act on that. How about you, ladies and gentlemen? Thoughts on causes of death for young people, or perhaps on the nature of changing the way you live?
TBH, it certainly doesn't want me to change the way I do anything. I'm sure if you measure raw numbers of accidents in any first world country as compared to a third word country (and ignore percentages of other types of death), accidents would still rank much lower. It doesn't mean that the USA or other countries are more prone to "accident" deaths than third world countries, it just means of the stuff we can methodically control and do something about (ie, diseases/vaccines, disaster preparation, etc. etc.) we have been able to drive down to ridiculously low levels.
If anything else, I'd consider that one of the greatest achievements of any first-world society. You shouldn't feel like living your life any different, but maybe appreciate WHERE you live just a little bit more.
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Blazinghand
United States25550 Posts
On September 02 2011 09:02 EvilTeletubby wrote:Show nested quote +On September 02 2011 07:30 Blazinghand wrote:In the end, I'm not sure whether this block of statistics has changed my outlook on life. I wonder if this is even meant to? It's a lot harder to look at something intellectual and change the way I think, even if I think I'm doing so, than it is to have an emotional feeling about how the world works and act on that. How about you, ladies and gentlemen? Thoughts on causes of death for young people, or perhaps on the nature of changing the way you live? TBH, it certainly doesn't want me to change the way I do anything. I'm sure if you measure raw numbers of accidents in any first world country as compared to a third word country (and ignore percentages of other types of death), accidents would still rank much lower. It doesn't mean that the USA or other countries are more prone to "accident" deaths than third world countries, it just means of the stuff we can methodically control and do something about (ie, diseases/vaccines, disaster preparation, etc. etc.) we have been able to drive down to ridiculously low levels. If anything else, I'd consider that one of the greatest achievements of any first-world society. You shouldn't feel like living your life any different, but maybe appreciate WHERE you live just a little bit more.
That's true. It's definitely worth noting that the fact that the most common form of death (especially for infants!) is by accident means that our medical infrastructure is excellent. I wonder if I could find some per-capita rates of accidental death in 1st world and 3rd world countries. In any case, I'm sure that even if accidents were the only way to die, the 1st world would still be safer.
I guess I wrote this blog because I never put a lot of thought into this sort of thing, or what causes someone to die at a young age.
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Gotta admit the first 2 responses did make me chuckle a bit..
With regards to these statistics, I wouldn't say they are particularly shocking at all? If I understood this correctly, of the full percentage of deaths in this data, an average of about 35% is due to "accidents" which includes suicide and homocide. If all I've said so far is me understanding correctly, I'm not really shocked at all. It'd definitely be more shocking if say an 85%+ mark in the 13-45 age range was death by disease, because that would be a shockingly high mortality rate for people who should in theory have better immune systems. You obviously have to account for uncurable fatal diseases such as malignant cancers and whatnot, but if that percentage was higher I would be more frightened than having this roughly 35% accident deathrate.
While the 15-25 band of death by accident percentage is closer to 50%, gotta say humans will be humans. I'm currently 19, I tend not to participate in dumb life threatening activities.. but I have to say my friends however much I love them and try to deter them from doing dumb shit, will always indeed do, dumb shit. Would also expect some gang culture affiliation to that high percentage, as well as quite a lot of deaths (within reasonably low %age) being due to explosive/fire mishaps, although I will admit I didn't check the full statistics as I have a splitting headache whilst writing this.
All in all, not shocked though provided I did understand what I did read, like I said, the disease %age being higher would be more frightening to me 
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On September 02 2011 09:57 Blazinghand wrote:
That's true. It's definitely worth noting that the fact that the most common form of death (especially for infants!) is by accident means that our medical infrastructure is excellent. I wonder if I could find some per-capita rates of accidental death in 1st world and 3rd world countries. In any case, I'm sure that even if accidents were the only way to die, the 1st world would still be safer.
I guess I wrote this blog because I never put a lot of thought into this sort of thing, or what causes someone to die at a young age.
I'm not sure I'd go so far to say that our medical infrastructure is excellent. In fact, the WHO ranks the USA 37th out of 191 countries in its 2000 report ranking the worlds health systems.
http://www.who.int/whr/2000/media_centre/press_release/en/
From the report:
"The U.S. health system spends a higher portion of its gross domestic product than any other country but ranks 37 out of 191 countries according to its performance, the report finds. The United Kingdom, which spends just six percent of GDP on health services, ranks 18 th"
When you dive into the statistics more, you find that we do have one of the best emergency care health systems in the world...but what percentage of doctor visits today count as "life or death" situations in the USA?
I'd be curious to see how that CDC report classifies iatrogenic deaths. In some reports, they fall under the category of "accidental death", while others classify them in their own category, yet few (understandably) are able to completely calculate the number of deaths due to improper prescribing of interacting medications that manifest in stroke, myocardial infarction, accidental death from medication induced-syncope, etc...
But back to the original topic, if you limit what you do based on its risk of death (which we all do to some degree) you can very quickly eliminate normal, everyday tasks. And limiting too many normal, everyday tasks has been known to trigger neurological pathways that predispose you to OCD tendencies...not fun.
My wife has a mild form of OCD, mostly obsesses about things being dirty, but she has this one issue with broken glass. A glass jar can break in our house and I can spend 8 hours making sure every last shard is picked up, and 3 years later if someone drops something on the floor in that spot, she will still worry that it could have picked up a shard of glass that could somehow get into something someone swallows, lacerate their internal organs and kill them. She fully recognizes it is irrational and a manifestation of her OCD, but that still doesn't stop her from avoiding glass in any possible way. We just recently replaced all of our glass baking dishes because she read on some user forums that people had their glass baking dishes spontaneously explode on them. Now we have all cast iron/stainless steel baking dishes. Now really, what is the chance of a glass dish exploding AND resulting in someone's death? probably less than dying in a car accident, yet my wife has no fears of driving anywhere.
As you get older, you do change your perspective on death risk and what you are willing to do. At the age of 25, I had an incident at the beach where a small shark swam right past me, but its fin grazed my leg and cut it. I was out beyond the sandbar and I freaked out - cause blood and sharks aren't supposed to be a good combo, even when the sharks are small. I got back to shore as quickly as possible and it was literally 4 years later before I went to the beach again (I live in FL, about 45 min from the beach). To this day, I have a greater appreciation/fear of nature. When I go kayaking, I no longer find it funny to tip my friend's kayak because I realize the danger a gator poses even if the chances of one attacking from below are small. I think these types of changes in the way we live our lives to prevent accidental death are okay, but even my wife realizes that her fear of glass goes too far - it's just easier to avoid the panic attacks if glass can't break in our house.
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