I remember discussions a couple years ago here on Hacker News of the original 2012 article from the New England Journal of Medicine.[1] A lot of health discussions here on Hacker News badly need historical perspective like this, as prevalent causes of death in the United States (and other developed countries) have changed enormously during the lifetimes of my aunts and uncles (two of whom are still living in their own homes without expensive medical support in their nineties). Scientific American ran a good article, "How We All Will Live to Be 100,"[2] that same year on the huge gains in longevity that have been achieved by reductions in disease burden. Official health statistics show that life expectancy has been increasing at age 40, at age 60, at age 65, and even at age 80[3] quite steadily throughout my lifetime and throughout your lifetime. We may outlive a few of today's common causes of death if these trends keep up.
it looks logical - once influenza was stopped from killing people before age 40-50, people started to live into the age where cancer/Alzheimer are among the majors. Once we reign in the cancer/etc... and will be living well into 80-90-100 something else will be the majors there. For example something computer induced (i'll personally have 65+ years at the screen (or at/with mental implant which will replace the screen in 10 years) by the age of 80). Or something like "you've been terminated as ratio of you production/consumption fell below 1" :)
The present outer limits, the very dramatic falloff in survival past age 100, appears to be largely caused by senile systemic amyloidosis, based on autopsy evidence from the recent past. Misfolded proteins, amyloids, clog up your cardiovascular system until it fails. This will kill those who survive everything else. Unlike other better known forms of amyloid these are proteins involved in thyroid hormone transport.
The SENS Research Foundation funds some of the work on potential treatments for this condition, based on a new approach in biotechnology using what are called catalyic antibodies [1] to break down the amyloid, though it is fair to note that as in many of these things much of the research community interest where it exists at all lies in treating the rare genetic variant that young people can suffer. It's called transthyretin-related hereditary amyloidosis, but it is basically the same process - you can just only suffer it young if you have exactly the right rare mutation.
The other possibility is that an increasingly poor diet and lack of exercise are contributing to higher mortality from cancer and heart disease. People used to walk a lot more and be more likely to do manual labour, but nowadays (especially in the USA) people hardly walk at all. Also, people eat a lot more processed food than they used to.
Not sure why the downvote. There is overwhelming evidence showing that both cancer and heart disease are significantly influenced by diet and exercise.
Not sure about overwhelming, but there's certainly evidence imo.
The down vote was probably because you didn't suggest to google "Sugar metabolic disease cancer" or "Sugar metabolic disease Alzheimer's", followed by a few example results such as:
Probably because the data in the post suggests otherwise:
- The causes of death with the strongest correlation to diet and exercise (heart disease, cerebrovascular disease, diabetes) have increased only slightly.
- All those causes of death have some degree of correlation with age
- The cause of death most strongly correlated with old age is the one showing the strongest increase (the correlation between diet and exercise and cancer is tenuous at best)
- It doesn't explain the heart disease peak in the '60s
I saw a great video somewhere I forget where about viruses and how vaccines dramatically reduced deaths from viruses.
I'm not sure what an age band is but the I saw video showed data of infections for many years it showed typical chart with peaks during each year. That data was rotated 90 degrees toward us the viewers so now each peak showed as a single vertical line.
The end result was a horizontal barcode type chart showing different clusters in certain decades.
Up to 1960 it was very dense waves but after 1960 (almost exactly) it's as if someone flipped a switch and suddenly large numbers of deaths from viruses stopped.
I read The Healthy Programmer and it had a bunch of exercises you could do while sitting. You could also, if body-abled just start working out, jogging or something else.
Also have a good diet. Diet and exercise are the main ways to prevent both cancer and heart disease. There is also emerging evidence that vitamin D helps prevent cancer.
That still leaves you with the pesky little detail that any kind of surgery has an associated risk of you leaving the hospital in a horizontal position. So you're definitely not going to be taking the risk of swapping your heart out every decade over exercise, you will only do that when there is absolutely no other option.
Elective surgery isn't a good idea. If you can do without, do without.
Could it be because they exercised in a natural way; by way of manual labor? In various forms such as car wash, house cleaning, walking, gardening and such.
My conjecture is that the rise of exercise/gym coincides with the rise of automated labor and as jobs moved from being labor intensive to knowledge intensive (i.e., as economy moved from agriculture oriented to manufacturing and then finally to service oriented).
How about significant non-systematic ways? Going back only a few years it seems most jobs were manual to some extent. People also were more self-sufficient: grew their own veg, made their own clothes, fixed their own things.
Even non-manual jobs would be more active as you'd need to visit people, move files, gather research materials or whatever.
I wonder if we need to change our interface with the PC - the typewriter is so 19th century. Something like Kinect waving your hands to get stuff from your mind into the box. I reckon with shorthand encoding you could get 200WPM, and fit.
Some people will continue to be paid to sit and think. The remaining employed people will be moving about using a mobile device and interacting with a sensor and beacon-suffused work environment. Perhaps we can have a 30 hour work week and have more time for physical activity.
Exactly. When you can work while driving, in line to get coffee, collecting the kids from school, going to the doctor etc I guess we'll spend more time working. I wonder if implants will let us work while we sleep?
Resveratrol is a good start along with regular exercise.
Yeah down vote the guy that had a stroke playing hockey, then started taking Resveratrol and was back on the ice 90 days later playing against Division 1 and ex-Pro players at a high level again.
Resveratrol is the real-deal, I know from personal experience.
> Resveratrol is the real-deal, I know from personal experience.
Even assuming you aren't lying, so what? Any number of things could have helped you purely by coincidence. Had things worked out differently, you could just as easily have been in here touting the benefits of copper bracelets, or megadose vitamin C, or cod liver oil. It's just not convincing.
That's why trials have hundreds or thousands of people: To make "it was coincidence" the least likely explanation, from a statistical standpoint.
Going by wikipedia stats (us population of 131 million, 420000 wwii deaths), and assuming 3 years for heavy US troop involvement in the war (say mid-1942 to mid-1945), it looks like war would have accounted for about 107 deaths per 100,000 people for those years.
And compare the accident rate on stair falls vs. injuries in elevators. Then think about it next time your workplace "healthy living" person nags you to take the stairs.
It's hard to explain just how profound safety culture is now. SFAIIK, it started with the IBEW ( 50% fatality in lineman early on... ) and propagated through all industries.
WWII "only" killed 4% of the population, with the Soviet Union bearing the brunt on the Allied side.
I have read and re read the article (albit on mobile) and can't see the '4%' figure anywhere. Where is it from? The Wikipedia article on Second World War casualties lists US deaths at .32% of population. As you noted, the USSR had it very rough, with figures quoted as high as 14.2% of the population killed.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties
As incredible as it might be to believe, the figures are a whole lot uncertain.
I've used 4% for long enough that I don't precisely remember how I arrived at it. I probably picked it from the middle of the range. I believe the lower bound is known to be pretty certainly 2.5% of global population. Or it was probably used by some source I've since forgotten.
Figures for China are very uncertain.
"*World-wide casualty estimates vary widely in several sources. The number of civilian deaths in China alone might well be more than 50,000,000."
Definitely. Factory machinery without belt or blade guards. Horse-related injuries. What cars there were had no seat belts or safety glass. Lots of super-toxic patent medicines. Flotation devices for small boats almost unheard of. Baseball without batting helmets. Lots more.
I'm wondering if this dataset exclusively covers the US, and if so, how much of any decrease in occupational accidents can be attributed to the loss in manufacturing jobs to overseas. Whether that represents progress is a matter of perspective.
The non vehicle accident death rate in 1900 was around 80, in 1950 around 40 and around 20 between 1980 and 2000.
So half of the decline was before manufacturing really hit it's stride in the US, and the decline slackened off as capacity really started moving overseas.
>> I'm wondering if this dataset exclusively covers the US<<
The opening says "The New England Journal of Medicine takes a look at the leading causes of death in the U.S. from 1900 to 2010."
How so? Your link shows a bit under 200 deaths per 100,000 per year from cancer (hard to read exactly on the graph) whereas the OP shows 185.9. Looks consistent to me.
Well, it's not that common that people just keel over dead and then a medical examiner has to deduce the cause of death from the corpse.
People get sick, they go to the doctor, they get diagnosed, and then they die. Whatever they were last sick from, that's what killed them. A lot of the illnesses on the 1900 list are not really going to have been hard for a 1900 doctor to diagnose. The doctor says you've got the flu or influenza or pneumonia, you probably do.
That's addressed in part in the article. Many "gastrointestinal infections" are thought to have been heart disease. So yes, there's some shift due to changing diagnostic capabilities, as well as definitions of illness.
[1] http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1113569
[2] http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/ful...
[3] http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box...