How You’ll Probably Die, Visualised

How You’ll Probably Die, Visualised

Ever wondered how things might come to an end? This chart visualises America’s cause-of-death data from the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention to give you a better idea.

Created by Nathan Yau from Flowing Data, the interactive visualisation shows how cause of death across 20 different categories varies according to age, gender and race. The height of each coloured chunk shows the percentage of people dying because of a particular cause at that age. It’s based on data from between 2005 and 2014, so it’s fairly up-to-date. Yau explains what you can find out:

When you select races, you might notice that the smaller groups, American Indian and Asian, appear to be more jagged, whereas cause of death for the larger groups, black and white, appear to be smoother. This is likely due to population size more than anything else. It’s a smaller sample, and there’s higher variance.

For example, compare cause of death for female versus male, and you see a big difference for external causes. For females, it accounts for about 5 per cent of deaths. It’s twice as common for males, and mostly at a young age pre-40s.

If you’re feeling particularly interested (morbid?), go play with the full interactive version here.

[Flowing Data]


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