The changes in the cause of death from 1900 to 2016 tells us a lot about the healthcare needs today and how they have changed over time. Evaluating the leading causes of death each year is one of the most important pieces of information that can be used to focus on improving a communities’ healthcare outcomes.
Oftentimes when evaluating a country or community’s quality of healthcare outcomes, the mortality rate, average life expectancy, and infant mortality rate are evaluated. These outcomes tell a strong story about how often people are dying and how often does someone typically live. Infant mortality rate also helps drive information to understand the future growth of a population. These healthcare outcomes are directly tied to the leading causes of death within a community.
In the early 1900s, most deaths were due to communicable diseases like polio, tuberculosis, or pneumonia. On the other end, the leading causes of death in 2016 were related to cardiovascular diseases, cancers, chronic respiratory diseases, and unintentional injuries. Prior to the creation of the polio vaccine, the case and death rates peaked in 1951 at 35.61 and 1.94 per every 100,000 people, prior to falling to less than 0.01 per every 100,000 people in 1971. The creation of vaccines and other medical technologies have forced communicable diseases to be severely limited in their impact. While there will always be threats like the COVID-19 coronavirus, today’s technology played a critical role in the case and death count of COVID-19 being approximately ten times less than a comparable disease and pandemic like the 1918 Flu Pandemic.
In 2020, the leading causes of deaths were primarily related to what some people will defne as “lifestyle choices”, or more appropriately the Social Determinants of Health (SDoH). In 2020 the top 10 leading causes of death were (1) heart disease, (2) cancer, (3) COVID-19, (4) unintentional injuries, (5) stroke, (6) chronic lower respiratory disease, (7) alzheimer’s disease, (8) diabetes, (9) influenza, and (10) nephritis. From 2011 to 2019 heart disease and stroke related deaths have increased by 10.4% and 16.3% respectively. Since 2019, the United States has also seen the death rate drastically increase due to diabetes, with over 100,000 diabetes related deaths in 2020 and 2021.
The rise in cardiovascular and diabetes related deaths can be directly attributed to a person’s lifestyle; the food someone eats, the physical activity they engage in, the alcohol consumed, and the community that they live in can all have immediate impacts. Today, nearly 40 million people, about 13% of the U.S. population, live in a food desert. Food deserts create communities that have higher death rates due to heart disease and stroke largely due to the limited nutritional options. The local, state, and federal government should prioritize reducing food deserts around the country in the pursuit of lowering heart disease and stroke related deaths. 80% of health outcomes are controlled by non-medical factors and the government should approach policy with this in mind, truly shifting resources to focus more on the community, ultimately reducing deaths across the country.
Erik Angus 