Calculate Your Risk of Dying with New Online Tool

Are you dying to know how much time you have left? Wondering how you will meet your demise? A new website call DeathRiskRankings.com can give you some insight. The program, created by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, uses publicly available statistical information from the U.S. (CDC Wonder) and the European Union (Eurostat) to calculate the death risk rankings of up to 66 causes of death, including accidents, homicides, and various diseases, based on gender, age, race and geographic region. And though the ‘death risk calculator’ cannot tell you with any certainty that you will die within a specific time from a specific cause, it can give you odds based on the variables you input—calculated in MicroMorts, which is a one-in-a-million chance.

“One of our tag lines is ‘Death has never been so much fun,’” said Paul Fischbeck, site developer and professor of social and decision sciences, engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon. “I study risk—financial, environmental, health and safety—I’ve done all of those things. One of the biggest risks we have is dying, it’s always hanging over us, he explained. “When you look at death statistics, there’s infant mortality and life expectancy. There’s not a lot in between. If you really wanted to know the statistics for you personally that you might die next year, you’d have a hard time trying to find it. We wanted to develop a site to allow you to do that.”

As the comparisons show, there are dramatic differences between groups when it comes to dying within the year. For every age group, men have a much higher annual death risk than women. For twenty-year-olds, the risk is 2.5 to 3 times greater, with accidents, homicides and suicides accounting for 80 percent of their death risks. However, by age fifty these causes account for less than 10 percent of the risk for men and heart disease is number one, accounting for more than 30 percent of all deaths. Women’s cancer risks are actually higher than men’s in their thirties and forties.

For heart disease and cancer, black Americans have a much higher death risk than whites, especially in their thirties and forties when they are twice as likely to die within the year as their white counterparts. Western Europeans have a greater risk of dying from breast and prostate cancer than people in the U.S., but the tables are turned when it comes to lung cancer. Obesity-related death risks are much higher in the U.S. than in Europe. For example, the annual diabetes death risk in the U.S. is three times that found in northern Europe for sixty-year-olds, the researchers said.

They also found that the risk of dying significantly increases with each year of age. A twenty-year-old U.S. woman has a one in 2,000, or 0.05 per cent, chance of dying in the next year, but by age forty, the risk increases threefold. By age sixty, it is 16 times greater, and by age eighty, it is 100 times greater, around 1 in 20, or 5 percent, which still means that “at eighty, the average U.S. woman still has a 95 percent chance of making it to her eighty-first birthday,” said David Gerard, a former professor at Carnegie Mellon who is now an associate professor of economics at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin.

Gerard says that “most Americans don’t have a particularly good understanding of their own mortality risks, let alone ranking of their relevant risks.” He and Fischbeck say they hope the site will not only help to inform the general public on death risks, but will provide a resource for those that are debating the health care reform issue in the U.S. “It’s much easier to make a persuasive argument when you have the facts to back it up, and this site provides all sides with the facts,” Fischbeck said. “Let’s get the discussion on the facts and not on anecdotes. We need to have a focused effort to try to understand why there are disparities and try to reduce them.”