I've been writing import tools (not quite screen scraping, but close). Today I used those import tools to grab a bunch of CDC data on causes of death. This can get a little depressing at times. Sometimes I notice a large number of people died of something I didn't even realize was a cause of death. Look at the skew to age in death attributed directly to dementia:
Other times, it's nice to note that hardly anybody dies of something (e.g. cannabis usage, such low numbers I didn't bother importing). Here's deaths due to all mental and behavioural disorders from use of psychoactive substance (and nearly all of them are alcohol):
1 comment:
Interesting diagrams. I am not sure about the vertical scale on the substance-related mortality.
What intrigues me is the decline as middle-age is passed. Is this an indication of a drop in death rate because surviving middle-age is surprising in this group? (And is smoking included?)
Related question. Is there any pattern of peaks like this in terms of vehicular-accident deaths? And smoking-related deaths for that matter.
Finally, since you got me speculating, I wonder how one factor out correlation among vehicular-smoking-substance-abuse. Do the stats you have reflect gather multiple contributors?
Just wondering about all these things.
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