Because the heart and circulatory system accumulate damage and fail first in very old age. Yes, the risk of cancer fall a little with old age (or at least the s

Because the heart and circulatory system accumulate damage and fail first in very old age. Yes, the risk of cancer fall a little with old age (or at least the speed of progression - most of the very old that die of heart disease and stroke probably have lots of incipient cancers that would have taken much longer to kill them). This risk never falls to zero or negligible and all anti-aging and regenerative therapies will reverse this - in a system where everything works slower and worse, even cancer works slower. And if you look at that list for example, you see that most of those causes of death are thing that would have been harmless to a person without cardiovascular diseases. Taking some of the examples: the long list of pneumonias is because old people that get stuck in bed because of a stroke or heart failure usually get "aspiration pneumonia" or that the buildup of fluid in lungs due to hart failure leads to a series of complications fatal when coupled with a pneumonia. The only causes from that list that were probably not related to cardiovascular disease, besides the cancers, are probably the 2 kidney failures (...if you don't assume things like renal artery stenosis due to aterosclerosys or aterosclerosys and hypertension related kidney disease). Also, things like "organ failure" are a way of describing the consequences not the cause - there was a cause for that organ failure, just that the pathologist didn't bother looking into it. And unless there is a real suspicion of criminal action, no path exams for the causes of death in old people are really conducted scientifically anywhere in the world.