Causes of death in the UK (mortality statistics)

I'm always blathering about cause of death, particularly in terms of odds-ratio relating to some factor that I have just read about, so I thought it would be useful to capture some of the headline facts and create a list of some useful data sources.



The starting point for this post was reading this article in the guardian - http://is.gd/zDDv8C and following the the links to the Mortality statistics report from the office for national Statistics.

The most recently available full year data is for 2010 (Apr 2012)

I think it is worth repeating 2 of the facts plucked from the reports own summary.

• The percentage of the population who died in 2010, was the lowest ever recorded.
• The infant mortality rate in 2010, was the lowest ever recorded

The breakdown for the grouped causes of death indicates that while a 35-44 year old man is in the hot-zone for suicide, that the death rate for Cancer and Heart disease has jumped up even higher. The chart suggests that a 35 year old man might do well to stop drinking and smoking and go to the gym more often. The rates are per million population.

(these charts don't include the older age groups for which there is data, because the heart disease/cancer values dominate the chart. Probably when I am in my 50s I'll write another post and exclude all the younger categories to make up for it.)

(I've also arbitrarily omitted diseases of the nervous system, and respiratory diseases which would both show up in these charts)

I think both charts indicate that ageing is pretty bad for you, and that the government should ban it immediately.

This one is the combined top 10 for women and men:

I'd be interested to know how much of the high number of Dementia deaths for women is a result of the age-gender distribution of the population, and how much is from direct gender specific factors.



Sources

The UK office of national statistics has a "publication Hub" which seems to be a good starting point for this type of data;
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/hub/index.html

The home office has data sets for murder and manslaughter;
http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/publications/science-research-statistics/research-statistics/crime-research/hosb1011/

ONS Population estimates Quinary Age groups for UK Consituent countries

ONS Annual Mortality Report 2010