Saturday, November 5, 2022

School chums: After-action-report

Eight of us met for lunch. Most of us are 63-years-old. I have not seen most of them for forty years.

Three of us had "zippers" on our chests and one of us had a pacemaker. It reminded me that Kaiser Wilhelm selected 65 as the retirement age because only half of the men would live that long. Two of my table-mates informed us that they inherited their condition. One's father died at the age of 68. The other had a paternal grandfather who died when his dad was 12. The man whose father died at 68 said that if it had just been a few years later, there would have been effective treatments for his condition.

Blue line is the crude annual death-rate per 100k circa 2001 and the red line is the same, circa 2018.

It made me curious regarding recent progress on reducing the death-rate due to heart-attacks and strokes.

Roughly speaking, the death-rate due to diseases of the circulatory system dropped by 20% for men in their 50s, 30% for men in their 60s and an astounding 40% for men in their seventies and eighties between 2002 and 2018.

The reason for the funky time period is because I chose a five-year time-slice at the beginning and end of the period where CDC data can be accessed by the Wonder data tool.

Since we all die of something eventually and must sum up to 1.0000 in the end, it can be expected that the death-rates due to cancer, dementia and jealous husbands climbed during that period.


11 comments:

  1. I am rooting (at that age) for "Death by Jealous Husbands", but I suspect that cancer and dementia are far more likely.

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  2. When I was a kid it was an accepted fact that if you had a heart attack that you would be dead within a year. And those that had a heart attack acted like it was a sure thing that they would be which may have lead to it.---ken

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  5. How much is due to medical advances and how much is from other factors like the decline in smoking?

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    1. Smoking declined from 34% of the adult population to 23% over that time-frame, so that was some of it.

      Another factor is that my perception is that people, men, are much quicker to call 9-1-1 than they used to be. 9-1-1 is now the universal portal for reporting a problem. Also, cell-phones mean that you can make that call from your vehicle or woods or tennis court.

      There are also some people who carry a single, full-strength aspirin tablet (or four, low-dose chewables) as emergency treatment for a heart-attack. My sister-in-law the nurse actually administered it once to a neighbor with chest-pain. The ambulance showed up in 10 minutes...but ten minutes can seem like an eternity when the elephant is sitting on your chest.

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  6. Watch it climb over the next few years from "SADS" 'cause nobody wants to put 2 and 2 together.

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  7. Surgery may also be a factor. When my mom had triple bypass surgery she was in her early 80s, and there were people there getting bypass surgery that were in their 90s. I was shocked. Also, the development and refinement of heart / cardio procedures that head off potentially life-threatening problems (placing stents and so on) continues to advance.

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    1. 3-D and real-time imaging has also been a God-sent.

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