Amidst all the doom & gloom there have been a few seasonal new year, new beginning type pieces in the media
I have never really felt that about New Year, not even when living in hot countries. Here, in the dark & cold, how could it be a new start. Hibernation would be a better bet
Spring is when I feel a new beginning. I would say the New Year should be in April, were it not already spoken for by the taxman
Winter gloom is appropriate for the consideration of the other inevitability of life – death
I get extremely irritated when people say “people who do X are more likely to die”, as if not dying were an option
The probability that I will die is 1
The probability that I will die of any particular disease is either 0 or 1, it is just impossible to say which
But in a spirit of morbid enquiry I decided to look at what a frequentist would say were my chances, given the available data
The average woman of 60 in this country has not quite a quarter of a century still to go
Her life is overwhelmingly likely – on 2 out of 3 occasions – to end in one of the 2 biggies – diseases of the circulatory system, or cancer, with a more or less 50/50 split between those two. Respiratory disease is next on the list, with about half the chance – 1 in 7
But what if I am ‘better’ than average and live long enough to open all those 85th birthday cards?
Strangely, death gets more miscellaneous
Diseases of the circulatory system come out even more on top – 2 out of 5 chances of going like this
Cancer drops right down to 1 in 8. I was under the impression that cancer rates continue to increase with age, so either something else kills you first, or, more disturbingly, it is less likely to get diagnosed, treated & recorded
Respiratory disease gets a bit more common – perhaps pneumonia is the old woman’s friend as well as the mans
Diseases of the mind are just as likely as pneumonia though
Most strikingly a cause known as ‘Symptoms, signs & abnormal clinical & laboratory findings, not elsewhere classified’ accounts for 1 in 8 deaths. What the rest of us might call death from old age, I guess
Perhaps these are the only ones who, in the opinion of those who claim to be able to judge such things, do NOT die before their time
