4 ms·

I don't think "age" is a valid cause of death. Old people are more likely to die than young people, but they still die from particular causes that should be dis

by bloak 4y ago

I don't think "age" is a valid cause of death. Old people are more likely to die than young people, but they still die from particular causes that should be distinguished and recorded. For people of any age it's not obvious how to record a combination of circumstances or a cascade of conditions. For example, a very common fate for old people is to fall, break a hip ("neck of femur"), be admitted into hospital, and then die from pneumonia a week or so later. I think the bone breaks easily in old people often because of vitamin or calcium deficiency. In one case the fall was also indirectly caused by a preceding stroke, so the cause of death was ...?

zeroth32 4y ago
> I don't think "age" is a valid cause of death. > so the cause of death was ...? Age?
- bloak 4y ago
  One of the main purposes of recording cause of death is so that we know what to concentrate on for improving public health. For example, perhaps we could make old people's bones less brittle by adding vitamins to bread, or do something to persuade more of them to eat something other than just bread and jam, or perhaps we could stop them getting infected with pneumonia in hospitals, or somehow make pneumonia more survivable, or ... Putting "age" as the "cause of death" would be about as useful as putting "birth" or "cessation of the vital functions".
  - smcl 4y ago
    I agree and I might add that we probably don't want to normalise the idea that the elderly just randomly die of "old age". That could easily result in a decline of standards in hospitals and elderly residential homes, or it could even give the Harold Shipmans of the world free reign to do as they please: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Shipman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Shipman Everybody dies and we can't deny that, there likely won't be some breakthrough within my lifetime where we conquer death. But we should still be striving to understand the causes, to know whether someone died because of heart failing due to being really old[0], or whether it was down to something preventable or that otherwise indicates a failure in our system [0] - not a doctor, I don't know what sort of things they normally use for this. Substitute an actual cause of death if this doesn't sound right :)
  - zeroth32 4y ago
    Fixing old people is incredibly ambitious. How about we concentrate on low hanging fruit first? Young person with broken hand, knife stabbing, or dog bite comes into hospital, gets treated, leaves 2 hours latter. Nobody gets bankrupt, has to sell kidney, nobody waits 20 hours.... > getting infected with pneumonia And old age is an infection as well, right? ...
    - smcl 4y ago
      This is a little bit naive, I don't think you've really thought a great deal about how healthcare works. You're talking about a basic triaging system in ER (or A&E or whatever it's called in your locale) - this is something that every hospital does already. It's kind of obvious you're young (20-something or at the very most early 30s), but just remember you're going to be "infected" by old age one day. You'll likely feel a little bit different about the whole old people are just ill and die attitude then. And that's not even to mention the elderly who are alive today who we are responsible for and should feel compassion for. A bit of empathy goes a long way :)
numlock86 4y ago
> I don't think "age" is a valid cause of death. Uhm, considering our technological advancement in the medical sector I'd argue "age" should be the only valid cause of death. Sadly it isn't for obvious reasons (firearms, car crashes, everything else related to safety etc., hunger, lack of medical equipment and supplies etc. etc. etc.) ... and ironically the article is one of those causes that could and should be easily avoided.
- KineticLensman 4y ago
  > Uhm, considering our technological advancement in the medical sector I'd argue "age" should be the only valid cause of death. For this to be true we would have to be able to predict and treat every possible disease and condition, wherever it occurred. When I had my Ventricular Fibrillation event I was lucky that it occurred just outside the door of a place that had a defibrillator. If it had occurred twenty minutes later I would have been on my own in the countryside. No amount of credible technological advancement would have saved me then. Oh, and there are quite a few cancers and other diseases for which there is no known cure.
  - jodrellblank 4y ago
    > "No amount of credible technological advancement would have saved me then." Assuming there was a cause of your fibrillation; maybe advancement in imaging and detection could have spotted worsening rhythm or small damage developing in the heart, or growing chemical imbalance in time before it happened, and given you an Implantable defibrillator[1] in advance, or a hypothetical wearable one, or treatment to repair the damage and avoid it happening. I sometimes wonder what it would take in terms of FutureTech to "save everyone"; how about if you were alone but concsious, defibrillator tech builtin to every vehicle (electric vehicles at least have some high voltage power already; sensing and cables wouldn't be a big addition to them) would have got a treatment close enough to be useful. If you were unconscious and wearing a watch with ECG features, it could detect you falling over and alert somewhere, a defibrillator drone takes off, today's fast drones can do 50+mph it could have spikes to get through your clothing and be alerting a telemedicine doctor to remote view it... I suppose we have to rule out teleportation, but humanoid robots are fairly credible, suffusing the planetary surface with nanotech is uncomfortably credible and that possibly changes a lot. e.g. blood additives which carry much more oxygen and can keep your brain alive after your heart stops pumping until help can arrive, or etc. [1] https://www.heart.org/en/health-topics/arrhythmia/prevention--treatment-of-arrhythmia/implantable-cardioverter-defibrillator-icd https://www.heart.org/en/health-topics/arrhythmia/prevention...
hamburglar 4y ago
It’s almost as if the medical community should come up with a general term for a death caused by a combination of complications due to circumstances highly correlated with being old.
nradov 4y ago
Why did that fall happen? There is a hidden epidemic of sarcopenia among the elderly. If we trace the causal chain back we often find the root cause was muscle atrophy caused by lack of resistance training and insufficient protein intake (protein digestion becomes less effective as we age). But sarcopenia usually isn't recorded as a contributing cause on the death certificate.

by bloak 4y ago

zeroth32 4y ago

> I don't think "age" is a valid cause of death. > so the cause of death was ...? Age?

bloak 4y ago
One of the main purposes of recording cause of death is so that we know what to concentrate on for improving public health. For example, perhaps we could make old people's bones less brittle by adding vitamins to bread, or do something to persuade more of them to eat something other than just bread and jam, or perhaps we could stop them getting infected with pneumonia in hospitals, or somehow make pneumonia more survivable, or ... Putting "age" as the "cause of death" would be about as useful as putting "birth" or "cessation of the vital functions".
- smcl 4y ago
  I agree and I might add that we probably don't want to normalise the idea that the elderly just randomly die of "old age". That could easily result in a decline of standards in hospitals and elderly residential homes, or it could even give the Harold Shipmans of the world free reign to do as they please: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Shipman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Shipman Everybody dies and we can't deny that, there likely won't be some breakthrough within my lifetime where we conquer death. But we should still be striving to understand the causes, to know whether someone died because of heart failing due to being really old[0], or whether it was down to something preventable or that otherwise indicates a failure in our system [0] - not a doctor, I don't know what sort of things they normally use for this. Substitute an actual cause of death if this doesn't sound right :)
- zeroth32 4y ago
  Fixing old people is incredibly ambitious. How about we concentrate on low hanging fruit first? Young person with broken hand, knife stabbing, or dog bite comes into hospital, gets treated, leaves 2 hours latter. Nobody gets bankrupt, has to sell kidney, nobody waits 20 hours.... > getting infected with pneumonia And old age is an infection as well, right? ...
  - smcl 4y ago
    This is a little bit naive, I don't think you've really thought a great deal about how healthcare works. You're talking about a basic triaging system in ER (or A&E or whatever it's called in your locale) - this is something that every hospital does already. It's kind of obvious you're young (20-something or at the very most early 30s), but just remember you're going to be "infected" by old age one day. You'll likely feel a little bit different about the whole old people are just ill and die attitude then. And that's not even to mention the elderly who are alive today who we are responsible for and should feel compassion for. A bit of empathy goes a long way :)

numlock86 4y ago

> I don't think "age" is a valid cause of death. Uhm, considering our technological advancement in the medical sector I'd argue "age" should be the only valid cause of death. Sadly it isn't for obvious reasons (firearms, car crashes, everything else related to safety etc., hunger, lack of medical equipment and supplies etc. etc. etc.) ... and ironically the article is one of those causes that could and should be easily avoided.

KineticLensman 4y ago
> Uhm, considering our technological advancement in the medical sector I'd argue "age" should be the only valid cause of death. For this to be true we would have to be able to predict and treat every possible disease and condition, wherever it occurred. When I had my Ventricular Fibrillation event I was lucky that it occurred just outside the door of a place that had a defibrillator. If it had occurred twenty minutes later I would have been on my own in the countryside. No amount of credible technological advancement would have saved me then. Oh, and there are quite a few cancers and other diseases for which there is no known cure.
- jodrellblank 4y ago
  > "No amount of credible technological advancement would have saved me then." Assuming there was a cause of your fibrillation; maybe advancement in imaging and detection could have spotted worsening rhythm or small damage developing in the heart, or growing chemical imbalance in time before it happened, and given you an Implantable defibrillator[1] in advance, or a hypothetical wearable one, or treatment to repair the damage and avoid it happening. I sometimes wonder what it would take in terms of FutureTech to "save everyone"; how about if you were alone but concsious, defibrillator tech builtin to every vehicle (electric vehicles at least have some high voltage power already; sensing and cables wouldn't be a big addition to them) would have got a treatment close enough to be useful. If you were unconscious and wearing a watch with ECG features, it could detect you falling over and alert somewhere, a defibrillator drone takes off, today's fast drones can do 50+mph it could have spikes to get through your clothing and be alerting a telemedicine doctor to remote view it... I suppose we have to rule out teleportation, but humanoid robots are fairly credible, suffusing the planetary surface with nanotech is uncomfortably credible and that possibly changes a lot. e.g. blood additives which carry much more oxygen and can keep your brain alive after your heart stops pumping until help can arrive, or etc. [1] https://www.heart.org/en/health-topics/arrhythmia/prevention--treatment-of-arrhythmia/implantable-cardioverter-defibrillator-icd https://www.heart.org/en/health-topics/arrhythmia/prevention...

hamburglar 4y ago

It’s almost as if the medical community should come up with a general term for a death caused by a combination of complications due to circumstances highly correlated with being old.

nradov 4y ago

Why did that fall happen? There is a hidden epidemic of sarcopenia among the elderly. If we trace the causal chain back we often find the root cause was muscle atrophy caused by lack of resistance training and insufficient protein intake (protein digestion becomes less effective as we age). But sarcopenia usually isn't recorded as a contributing cause on the death certificate.