This article shows that the largest causes of death do not necessarily produce the largest total loss of life expectancy. Some comparatively small causes of death, such as road accidents and congenital anomalies result in a large loss of life expectancy in terms of years per person, whereas some large causes of death, such as diseases of the circulatory system and of the respiratory system result in a low average loss of life expectancy. Concentrating on the simple numbers of deaths by cause obscures this important message. The number of deaths caused by road accidents is not a high proportion of the total. Statistics from the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys (OPCS) show that of over 560,000 deaths in England and Wales in 1990, just over 5,000 (1%) resulted from a road accident. However, the loss of life expectancy statistics shows that road accidents are a much more important cause of loss of life expectancy than is otherwise apparent. Road accidents differ from most of the other causes of death in that to a large degree such deaths are preventable whereas death by one cause or another is inevitable. Many of the other causes of death and disease are associated with the natural process of growing older.
Abstract