This data tends to be more accurate for cancer and injuries, but under-report deaths from COPD, stroke and diabetes and over-report deaths from heart disease.
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There’s bad news hidden among the good, as death rates in the US dropped yet now halted in their decline, after 44 years of studying the health of the American population.
To examine long-term trends in mortality, Massachusetts and colleagues analyzed USA national vital statistics to determine the total and annual percent change in age-standardized death rates and years of life lost before age 75 for all causes combined and for the leading causes.
Heart disease, cancer, stroke and diabetes claim lives of millions in the USA alone, but according to a new study from the American Cancer Society, those numbers have in fact declined, Health 24 reports.
Slowing decreases in disease-related death, however, may relate to the growing obesity and metabolic syndrome epidemics in the country, researchers said.
However, deaths from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) – a debilitating disease often caused by smoking – increased dramatically during the time period studied, 1969 to 2013.
According to Jemal, the overall progress is attributed to a decline in smoking, early diagnosis, and better treatment of illnesses such as heart disease, cancer, and stroke.
“Tobacco is the first and still the most preventable cause of premature death in the USA”, he said.
“We continue to make progress in reducing death rates from five of the six major causes of death”, said lead researcher Dr. Ahmedin Jemal, the society’s vice president for the surveillance and health services research program. There were sex differences in unintentional injury deaths, with the rate for men decreasing while the rate for women increased steadily from 1992 to 2013.
But he also points out that our life expectancy can only be pushed so far – and we’ve come a long way.
For heart disease, the figure declined from 28.8 to 9.1, or 68.3%.
Occasional stagnations in death rates have various potential explanations.
The review authors found that lost of life to these chronic diseases, in terms of years, declined, including in more recent years for COPD as smoking rates have declined.
The overall decrease in the death rate for unintentional injuries is thought to reflect continuous declines in deaths related to motor vehicles. “The reduction in cancer deaths since the early 1990s is also an outcome of tobacco control efforts, as well as advances in early detection and treatment”. This may reflect the importance of smoking cessation in preventing early deaths. Death rates (measured as the number of deaths per 100,000 people in a given year) in the United States have been declining for decades, an effect of improvements in health care, disease management and medical technology – and the researchers had expected to find more of the same.
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One limitation of the study is its reliance on death certificates to indicate disease-specific trends, the authors acknowledge.
