Risk of death by age and sex
Clinical bottom line
The older you are, the greater is your risk of dying in any one year. That risk is higher if you are a man.
Risk of death
Someone once said that the only certainties in this world were death and taxes. We look at tax rates with some interest, but give death rates much less attention, except when they are forced on us by some catastrophe, societal or personal. For that reason we thought it useful to have a reminder of the major effects on death rates - namely our sex, and our age.
Data were taken from UK national mortality statistics, which provides death rates per million population by age and sex. These have been recalculated to show the results as an annual risk - a chance of 1 in X of dying in the next year (on average), by your age and by your sex.
Table 1: Annual risk of death by age and sex in the UK
| 1 in X |
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| All ages |
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| Under 1 |
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| 1- 4 |
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| 5 - 14 |
|
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| 15-24 |
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| 25-34 |
|
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| 35-44 |
|
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| 45-54 |
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| 55-64 |
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| 65-74 |
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| 75-84 |
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| 85 and over |
|
|
Figure 1: Annual risk of death by age and sex in the UK
Results
There is a clear tendency for the lowest annual risk of death in children and young adults, with greater risk for the very young and very old. By the time we are over 65-70 years (depending on sex), we have at least a 1 in 100 chance of dying in the next years, rising to 1 in 10 over 85 years.
Another way of representing the data could be in the form of a Paling Perspective Scale, and one version of this using some truncated data is shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2: Annual risk of death by age and sex in the UK using Paling Perspective Scale (blue=men, red = women)
Comment
Even for people in their ninth decade, the odds of seeing their next birthday are on their side.
Reference
Mortality statistics 2005. National Statistics Series DH2 no.32 (www.statistics.gov.uk)