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Comment by danieltillett | Hacker News Reader

So what cause of death went up?

Edit. To answer my own question it seems to be the very vague "All other causes" [1].

1. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db88.htm

No other cause went up to a meaningful degree in terms of death rates, which is what the submitted article mostly focused on. "The overall rate of deaths from cancer decreased from about 215 per 100,000 people in 1991 to about 169 per 100,000 people in 2011, researchers found." An article in a series on Slate, "Why Are You Not Dead Yet? Life expectancy doubled in past 150 years. Here’s why"[1] Provides some of the background.

Life expectancy at age 40, at age 60, and at even higher ages is still rising throughout the developed countries of the world.[2]

Yes, people all around the world eventually die of something, but they are dying at ever later ages after longer and longer spans of healthy living all around the world. That's why we can say that death rates are going down. As the link you found after your comment edit says, "Although single year improvements in mortality were often small, the age-adjusted risk of dying dropped 60 percent from 1935 to 2010."

After edit: another participant here in another comment links to CDC documents that plainly show the drop in all-cause death rates in the United States.

[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science_of_...

[2] http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box...

169 out of 10,000. For some reason, this number sounds more scary than the percentage.

probably because you missed a zero. 169 out of 100,000

I think this is the relevant data:

1991: page 9 of http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/dvs/lead1900_98.pdf

2011: page 4 of http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr61/nvsr61_06.pdf

Wow this data is not easy to compare. In 1991 the death rate from Cancer was 514,657 out of 2,169,518 deaths (23.7%). In 2011 it was 575,313 out of 2,512,873 deaths (22.9%). This does not look like a 22% drop to me any way you dice the numbers.

Over the same time heart disease dropped from 720,862 in 1991 to 596,339 in 2011. This is much more impressive.

I think you and the news article are thinking of different statistics.

The metric described in the news article is deaths by cancer per 100,000 individuals.

What you calculated is the percentage of deaths due to cancer.

I don't have access to the scientific article that was the foundation of this news piece but it looks like the reduction in death rate was not the authors' main point [1].

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24890451

Yes it looks like they are using the age adjusted rate. The problem is it looks like almost most causes of death have fallen in an age adjusted rate by about 20% also. This is great news, but I am not sure why cancer was singled out.

Why do you think that any cause of death had to go up?

Overall US death rate went down from 8.5 to 8.0 between 1991 and 2011 (ie 6%). So every cause of death might have gone down (although I couldn't find the stats).

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005131.html

Not when Cancer is responsible for 1/3 of all deaths - the maths just don't work.

23% (576k out of total 2515).

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/282929.php#top_10_l...

The rate of 169 per 100k is confirmed in this story as well.

The real answer is they are comparing age adjusted death rates per 100,000. This has fallen across the range of all causes of death by around 20%.

Re your edit: I'd not have guessed that this undefined category would be so large, it would be very interesting to see a breakdown of this category on a timeline. My guess is that some of the bigger ones in there could be far easier to solve than cancer.

My feeling the "All the causes" are a mix of deaths where there were multiple causes or the data was not recorded correctly.

My guess is diabetes or heart disease.

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