Causes Of Death: 1900 vs. 2010

@justinghill -- looks wrong to me.

uh, is this graph designed wrong or is it just me?

Collin hit it on the head. Cancer is a disease of probability. Most people have some pre-cancerous masses in their body, whether they know it or not. Historically, most people died before they could become problematic (most cancer's are slow growing and take many years to become problematic). In fact, the recommended "treatment" for some cancer's is still to ignore them, because they progress slowly enough it's highly likely you'll die from something else first (this can often be the course of action for prostate cancer, for example).

You've also probably had cancerous cells in your body before that your immune system managed to handle on it's own. Basically, it's a normal occurrence that has some small probability of not being dealt with by your body on it's own. And the longer you live, the more chances you have for that to happen.

@pebbe - there is a 100% chance we will all die.

I'm with pebbe -- it's time to boycott Death. That'll show him.

I like the "senility" category in 1900, I think it means "we have no idea what killed him/her"

Meat consumption.

There's a good reason why we're seeing an increase in cancer -- because people are living longer! It's not that there's an epidemic of cancer, but rather an increase in the average life span of people from 1900 to 2010. In 1900, the avg age of death was 45; in 2010, it's 75.

Cancer is a disease of old age. If you're not dying from vaccine-preventable diseases and have access to antibiotics, then you're probably gonna end up dying from something like cancer or heart disease. Once we solve those, then people will start dying from kidney disease, pneumonia and falls due to osteoporosis.

Something will get us eventually. A mere increase in ratio doesn't constitute an epidemic.

Very sad to see that all causes of death still add up to 100%. That is no progress at all!

Nice and interesting little chart!

It would be difficult to draw conclusions about the state of medicine from it though, because there are a lot of other factors to take into account.

For one, life expectancy in 1900 was around 47 years in the US, versus 78 years in 2010. This means that people in 1900 may have died of tuberculosis before the onset of cancer or heart disease.

Then, there's the diagnosis problem. A lot of the types of cancer that we can identify today weren't known or diagnosable in 1900, so people could have died from cancer and the death could be attributed to something else (e.g. senility).

The cancer thing is not surprising at all. Almost everybody has at least one relative that died of or just had cancer. It's literally everywhere.

And the heart diseases is because of unhealthy lifestyles. I don't think I need to remember you that the so-called first world is fat, although that's not the only thing.

The cancer thing is also related to our current lifestyles. Most things are cancerous in some way (some more than others, of course).

Probably the next goal in medicine (without forgetting actually curing the diseases) is preventive medicine and education. If we can't cure a disease, let's try not to have it.