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Comment by dilawar | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if a gone lost hundreds of years ago is somehow _responsible_, then why heart attack related death mostly occured in last 50 years?

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The greatest risks to your health throughout history were (contagious) diseases and infections. With the advent of sanitation, food safety, modern medicine, etc., their percentage has dropped significantly.

But "you gotta die of something", so when one cause drops in rate, another rises. So if you're stubborn (lucky) enough not to die of anything else, it'll probably be either cancer or heart-related that gets you: up from 12% of all deaths in 1900 to 47% in 2010.[1]

In short, we're more likely to die of affluence diseases[2] if we're not dying of poverty diseases.[3]

[1] https://demography.cpc.unc.edu/2014/06/16/mortality-and-caus...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diseases_of_affluence

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diseases_of_poverty

It could be that they were not diagnosed as heart attacks before that.

edit: And also maybe general life style differences regarding availability and richness of food, exercise, shorter life spans etc.

In the 19th century, a heart attack may have been recorded as "old age", "sudden death", "apoplexy", "stomach cramps", "spasms", or a lot of other things. As long there weren't any suspicious circumstances I don't think they usually looked into it that closely.

I mean, this was when amputation and leeches was the pinnacle of medicinal triage. Life expectancy hit 49 in 1900 - for most of the 1800s it was below 40, a fact that still blows my mind today.

Life expectancy values were skewed a lot by infant mortality. This doesn't mean your average person died at 50.

Life expectancy @ 5y.o. (not sure about the exact age, but > 1y.o. is fine) is a better value to compare

...are you aware that most of that low life expectancy was caused by infant and child mortality? Once you lived past 15, you were expected to stick around at least to your 60s, if not more.

So yes, modern medicine is a Herculean effort in many ways. One of them is that it saves so many of our otherwise very frail and helpless children.

Thanks for this - I was using life expectancy at birth. Looks like it was around 55->60 from 1850->1900 if you lived to 5 looking at this chart: https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2013/05/Life-expectancy-b...

So people had less time to "wear the heart out", they moved significantly more and their diet probably was better then our average as long as they could eat regularly.

For most their diet probably wasn't better than a modern diet, just different. If you max out at 40 years, it's difficult to tell if your diet is bad in old age.

Farmers and middle-to-lower class people only 90 years ago (as per my grandmother) in my region where mainly eating potatoes, grain, and meat, veggies and fruit were usually only eaten for sundays, since it was more expensive on the market.

That doesn't sound like the pinnacle of healthy diets.

Even farther back, people ate whatever they found or farmed with very little variety. If you don't get old, you can have some very unhealthy diets without much ill effect. Diets around the world in the pre-industrial era have ranged from 100% meat to 0% meat, with grain fruit and starches also ranging all over the 100%-0% scale.

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