Website calculates odds of dying next year
Last Updated: Friday, August 28, 2009 | 1:11 PM ET
CBC News
People wondering how likely they are to die in the next year might get an idea from a new website called DeathRiskRankings.com.
The website, put together by a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pa., uses public data from the U.S. and Europe to compare mortality risks by gender, age and geographic region.
The site allows users to see their risk of dying within the next year — or a longer timeframe — and rank the probable causes of death. The user can then compare that information to others, for example, the odds of death next year from breast cancer of a 54-year-old Pennsylvania woman versus her counterpart in the United Kingdom.
"It turns out that the British woman has a 33 per cent higher risk of breast cancer death," said Paul Fischbeck, the site's developer and professor of social and decision sciences and engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
"But for lung/throat cancer, the results are almost reversed, and the Pennsylvania woman has a 29 per cent higher risk," he added in a release.
Toll of aging
In putting together the database, researchers found that after infancy, the risk of dying increases exponentially with each year of age.
A 20-year-old U.S. woman has a one in 2,000, or 0.05 per cent, chance of dying in the next year. By age 40, the risk is three times greater, by age 60, it is 16 times greater, and by age 80, it is 100 times greater, around one in 20, or five per cent.
"At 80, the average U.S. woman still has a 95 per cent chance of making it to her 81st birthday," said David Gerard, who is now a professor of economics at Lawrence University in Wisconsin.
There are also differences between groups. For example, for 20-year-old males, the annual death risk is 2.5 to three times greater with accidents with homicides and suicides accounting for 80 per cent of their death risks.
By age 50, these causes make up less than 10 per cent of the risk for men and heart disease becomes the top cause, accounting for more than 30 per cent of all deaths.
Generally, women's cancer risks are higher than men's in their 30s and 40s, the team said.
In terms of geographical differences, the annual diabetes death risk in the U.S. is three times that found in northern Europe for 60-year-olds.
Fischbeck said he hopes the site will help inform people and engage them in the debate over health care policy in the U.S.
Other life expectancy calculators on the web estimate when you are likely to die — rather than the probability of dying in the next year — based on lifestyle and health risk factors.
