Age-Adjusted CDC Death Reports / What Kills Americans / Biggest Loss of Life

The CDC regularly publishes reports that lists the causes of death among Americans. There is a shortcoming to this sort of data — it doesn’t take into account life expectancy. That is to say that a condition that disproportionately affects the old, such as Alzheimer’s, is weighted the same as causes of death that disproportionately affects the young, such as homicide. However, they do break down deaths by age group. So I decided to synthesize CDC data with life expectancy to determine how many years of life are lost to each cause of death. The following is the result:

The biggest difference, when compared against normal CDC reporting, is the inflation of accidents, drug/alcohol-induced deaths, suicide, and homicide among causes of death. Note that deaths by hate crime and terrorism were obtained from BJS and START respectively.