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> Or it could simply mean that another cause of death has increased. Like heart disease/diabetes from ever increasing obesity rates. You could hardly have pick

> Or it could simply mean that another cause of death has increased. Like heart disease/diabetes from ever increasing obesity rates. You could hardly have picked a worse counterexample. Deaths from heart disease have fallen dramatically over that time period, even faster than cancer deaths have dropped. Deaths from strokes - which at one point equalled deaths from all cancers combined - have fallen as well, although much of that drop occurred before the time period in question. Deaths from diabetes are actually quite few in number compared to heart disease and cancer. They've sort of plateaued over this time interval, which isn't good news, but hardly the alternate explanation for the reduction in cancer deaths. Now, there is one big cause of death which we haven't addressed: COVID-19, which causes about 3x the number of deaths as diabetes, and over half the number of deaths as all cancers combined. But that only began in 2020, and this data shows a decrease across the entire interval, so it's not relevant here.

TylerE 4y ago
Diabetes is almost never the direct cause of death, but it’s damn hard in the body. Hurts circulation, hurts your nerves, hurts your organs… and it can flare badly in reaction to some medications. So, the cause of death won’t be “diabetes”, it’ll be heart attack, stroke, chronic infection, something like that. Similar to AIDS in that it doesn’t kill you directly (not that we know that juvenile diabetes is a thing, and we routinely test for it), it just makes any other health challenge much dicier.
- chimeracoder 4y ago
  > Diabetes is almost never the direct cause of death, but it’s damn hard in the body. Hurts circulation, hurts your nerves, hurts your organs… and it can flare badly in reaction to some medications. So, the cause of death won’t be “diabetes”, it’ll be heart attack, stroke, chronic infection, something like that. It's not like the CDC doesn't know this. They understand how diabetes works; that's reflected in the tabulation of data. It's still incorrect to say that the drop in cancer deaths is explainable by the increase in diabetes deaths, not the least because age-adjusted diabetes deaths decreased during most of that interval.

TylerE 4y ago

Diabetes is almost never the direct cause of death, but it’s damn hard in the body. Hurts circulation, hurts your nerves, hurts your organs… and it can flare badly in reaction to some medications. So, the cause of death won’t be “diabetes”, it’ll be heart attack, stroke, chronic infection, something like that. Similar to AIDS in that it doesn’t kill you directly (not that we know that juvenile diabetes is a thing, and we routinely test for it), it just makes any other health challenge much dicier.

chimeracoder 4y ago
> Diabetes is almost never the direct cause of death, but it’s damn hard in the body. Hurts circulation, hurts your nerves, hurts your organs… and it can flare badly in reaction to some medications. So, the cause of death won’t be “diabetes”, it’ll be heart attack, stroke, chronic infection, something like that. It's not like the CDC doesn't know this. They understand how diabetes works; that's reflected in the tabulation of data. It's still incorrect to say that the drop in cancer deaths is explainable by the increase in diabetes deaths, not the least because age-adjusted diabetes deaths decreased during most of that interval.