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Death is inevitable, but premature death can be prevented, say health officials. In its first report calculating the number of these deaths in the U.S. that can be avoided, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) found that tens of thousands of lives can be saved, mostly by people making changes to their lifestyle.
“We have known now for decades that the ‘actual’ causes of premature death in the United States are not the diseases on death certificates, but the factors that cause those diseases,” says Dr. David Katz, director of Yale University’s Prevention Research Center. And now we have even more national data to prove it.
The analysis, published in the agency’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, detailed deaths from the five leading causes — heart disease, cancer, lower respiratory illnesses, stroke and unintentional injuries — in each state. These accounted for 63% of deaths in the U.S. between 2008-2010, the latest years for which the data have been studied. When the investigators compared the mortality rates in the three states with the lowest number of deaths by age group to the recorded number of deaths for each of these causes in each state, they determined that up to 40% of them could be avoided.
The researchers found that 92,000 lives could be saved from early death due to heart disease, 84,500 from cancer and 29,000 from lung diseases, mostly due to smoking.
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