A new interactive test is found to have the ability to calculate and further determine how a person is likely to die. According to Medical Today, a statistician from the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) has come up with an initiative to develop an interactive chart that can potentially determine how a person is likely to die based on his or her specific age, gender and ethnicity.
This innovation sprouted in his quest for answers to one of the morbid and awkward questions in mind: How will you die? With such desire and determination, Nathan Yau crafted the said chart through the aid of the information and other details taken from the Underlying Cause of Death database under the custody of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The researcher published in his blog FlowingData his explanation about these matters. For one, CDC generally arranges the causes of death into 113 subcategories -- falling into 20 categories of diseases and external causes of death.
The generated data include mortality and population statistics and figures for all the counties in the U.S. Records are also based on the data bank of death certificates -- describing in details the deaths of all individuals who died between 1999-2014. Hence, the documents have also disclosed a single underlying cause of death and demographic information.
"The interactive chart predicts the likelihood of death from 15 of the main causes, including infection, cancer, blood diseases, mental conditions, circulatory problems, congenital problems and digestive conditions," the report explained.
How does the procedure work?
To find out their possible cause of death, the user enters his gender, ethnicity and current age, before being presented with an array of colored dots. "Each dot represents one of your simulated lives, and as each year passes, more of your simulated selves pass away," Yau explained. "Color corresponds to cause of death, and the bars on the right keep track of the cumulative percentages. By the end, you're left with the chances that you will die of each cause."
More so, Yau emphasized that if users tend to enter current age as zero, then "the chart shows there is a low likelihood of dying in the following few decades." Hence, according to the chart, for the first 10 years of life, the highest risk of death is from perinatal causes while external causes commence to take the front place when one reaches early adulthood.
