> 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

> 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.