Find Out How You'll Die, In 4 Easy Online Steps

Monday, August 31, 2009 - 09:23 in Health & Medicine

A new website lets you figure out how you might die, by sorting death data by cause of death, sex, and age. For American males ages 20-29, the most common cause of death is accidents (40.2 percent of deaths), followed by homicide (17.5 percent), and suicide (11.7 percent). Urinary tract infections? 0.3 percent. The Death Risk Rankings site was compiled by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, and seems to have about a zillion ways to organize the data. It's quite cumbersome to use, so I'm going to save you the effort. I generated tables for cause of death by age group and by sex. Here's some of the highlights and a cheat sheet on how to find your own data. For American females, ages 20-29, the most common cause of death is still accidents (32.3 percent), followed by cancer and homicide. Are women...

Read the whole article on PopSci

More from PopSci

Latest Science Newsletter

Get the latest and most popular science news articles of the week in your Inbox! It's free!

Check out our next project, Biology.Net