10 Leading Causes of Death

In the post, Firearm Related Deaths I talked about the majority of deaths associated with firearms are suicides. In this post I am trying to put death due to mental disorder and suicide into perspective to illustrate the point that we need to put more work into the mental health of our country.

Below is a table of the leading cause of death based on health issues in 2016 (latest data available). This was generated with data from CDC Wonder. The list I put together may differ from other list for the leading causes of death that you have seen. This stems from how the database is searched. CDC Wonder has limits on how the data can be easily searched that can generate some differences. This list was created by searching the ICD-10 113 Cause List and sorting the data for the highest causes.

Rank	Cause of Death	Number of Deaths	Deaths per 100,000
1	Major cardiovascular diseases	835,947	258.7
2	Malignant neoplasms (Cancer)	598,038	185.1
3	Chronic lower respiratory diseases	154,596	47.8
4	Alzheimer's disease	116,103	35.9
5	Diabetes mellitus	80,058	24.8
6	Influenza and pneumonia	51,537	15.9
7	Kidney disease	50,046	15.5
8	Septicemia	40,613	12.6
9	Chronic liver disease and cirrhosis	40,545	12.5
10	Parkinson's disease	29,697	9.2

I said before that you can get different information based on how you search the CDC database. In 2016, 44,965 people committed suicide. That's a rate of 13.9 people per 100,000 commiting suicide. Which places it 8th on the list of causes of death.

My personal opinion is that most people that commit suicide have some kind of mental disorder. It may be long term or more transient brought on by recent events. Mental and behavioural disorders were cited, according to the CDC, as the cause of death for 131,604 people in 2016. That's a rate of 41 people per 100,000 making it the 4th leading cause of death in the U.S. If you combined the two categories you would be up to the third leading cause of death.

The problem is only getting worse

Data at the CDC goes back to 1999. Since then death associated with mental health and suicide has been increasing. Here's a graph of the two:

Since 2013 there has been improvement in death associated with mental disorders but the upward trend is still in place at an alarming rate. The rate of suicide in this country just continues to increase at a steady rate.

What's the result?

To me the major result of this comes in the form of allocation of research money. The U.S. government issues research grants totaling billions of dollars to numerous institutions. If we don't have accurate acknowledgement of the real issues, the agencies issuing these grants could be spending money in areas that are not as important.

A side effect is perpetrated by our media and news outlets. We are kept focused on issues such as gun control due to the number of deaths associated with guns. The reality of the situation is the mentally ill or suicidal individuals that have or can gain access to a weapon. As a society, we are being mislead. It may be intentional and it may not be, but we are being mislead. As an older friend of mine would say "We're not seeing the big picture".

CDC citation: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics. Underlying Cause of Death 1999-2016 on CDC WONDER Online Database, released December, 2017. Data are from the Multiple Cause of Death Files, 1999-2016, as compiled from data provided by the 57 vital statistics jurisdictions through the Vital Statistics Cooperative Program. Accessed at http://wonder.cdc.gov/ucd-icd10.html on Apr 22, 2018 10:21:21 AM