Want to Know How You'll Die? This New Interactive Test Will Tell You

• comments
• 
• 

An interactive chart was developed to calculate how a person is likely to die.

"Nothing, they say is more certain than death, and nothing more uncertain than the time of dying," English-American political activist Thomas Paine once said. However, things have change. There are now tools that can help one prepare for his death by giving ideas how one is likely to die.

Nathan Yau, a statistician from the University of California Los Angeles, developed an interactive chart that calculates how one is likely to die and in what specific age, based on his current age, gender and ethnicity, Medical News Today reported.

The chart was designed using the information from the Underlying Cause of Death database from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which includes mortality and population data for all countries in the United States between 1999 and 2014.

The CDC classified the causes of death into 113 subcategories under the umbrella of 20 categories of disease and external causes. The CDC uses the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, which is published by the World of Health Organization.

You can find the simulation on Yau's blog. One has to enter the following information to get the results: gender, ethnicity, and current age. The bar for the age can be shift down to zero to watch the rate of change.

"The main point, which is what you'd expect, is that mortality rate is much lower in the earlier years of life than in the older years," Yau wrote. "But, if you do die at a younger age, it's much more likely due to something external rather than a disease."

It can also be adjusted to older years. He observed that one is likely to die of a disease rather than something external. A shift past 80 years shows over 40 percent of chances that the cause of death will be circulatory, regardless of the demographic group.

"This surprised me because it seems like cancer would be the leading cause just going off general news," he added. "This is certainly true up to a certain age, but get past that and your heart can only keep going for so long."

MNT shared that there are numerous factors that influence how and when a person will die. Thus, the information presented in the simulation chart will only be a model of probability.

Yau is aiming to make the data accessible and useful to anyone, whether one is a data expert or not.