2023 U.S. Top Causes of Death by Sex and Age Group, Finalized
The sex gap in mortality leads to different patterns as well
In the last mortality post, I had the overall ranking of causes of death:
However, one of the biggest differences in mortality patterns comes from the sex gap.
Let’s start at the highest level, with the overall top causes of death by count, not distinguishing by age.
Ranking Causes of Death 2018-2023, Count
Top causes of death for females in the U.S.
Top causes of death for males in the U.S.
It’s interesting to note the similarities and differences:
Heart disease and cancer are the top two causes of death for both males and females, in that order.
After that, there are large differences in the rankings by sex. There are also large differences in the numbers of deaths, in total and by cause. When we get to split-outs by age, we will see why some of these differences exist.
Stroke ranks third for cause of death for females in 2023 (and in the pre-COVID years). It’s ranked fourth for males.
Males have “accidents” ranked third in 2023 and the pre-pandemic years. I put accidents in scare quotes, because a lot of those “accident” deaths are drug overdoses. Yes, they are accidental drug overdoses, but it seems to me that lumping in falls, drowning, motor vehicle accident deaths, and drug ODs all together is not useful for analysis. Not at this level, at least.
What may be of interest are the causes that appear in one table and not the other — for instance, suicide and liver disease shows up every year in the top 10 ranking for males, but never for females. Females had kidney disease rank in the top 10 causes each year, but it made the top 10 only twice in 2018-2023 for males.
Ranking Causes of Death 2018-2023, Age-Adjusted Death Rate
Let’s look at these tables in a different way — by age-adjusted death rate, quoted on a per 100,000 people per year basis.
I will keep the same ordering as the ranking by count (as age-adjusted death rate can change the ordering, as it’s a weighted average). Using the age-adjusted death rate will allow us to do more comparisons between the sexes.
Top causes of death for females in the U.S.
Top causes of death for males in the U.S.
Now with the age-adjusted rates, the story changes even where ranking is the same or similar. Heart disease is the top cause of death for both males and females, but the age-adjusted death rate for males is much higher than for females.
The death rate due to cancer for males is higher than that for females, too, but the difference is not as large.
While stroke is ranked higher as a cause of death for females than for males, the death rate for females is lower than for males. The issue is that males have higher death rates for all sorts of causes of death, so other causes rank higher.
Among the causes of death we see in these tables (that are in both), the only cause of death where the rate is higher for females is Alzheimer’s disease.
Ranking Tables for 2023 Causes of Death by Age, U.S., Count
Females
Males
When we split up all the deaths by 10-year age groups, we get a better handle on the distinctions of the groups.
Looking across the top row, you can see the number of deaths by age group. There are far more females dying over age 85 than males… but it’s not because the death rate is higher for females at the higher age (far from it). It’s because more women survive to those older ages.
Some of the reason that causes of death such as stroke and Alzheimers rank so highly for females compared to males is that deaths for females are skewed much older than males.
However, as we’ll soon see, the reason causes such as “accidents” feature so highly among men are because of what I call the “stupid period”… that leads to more deaths at younger ages for men.
Ranking Tables for 2023 Causes of Death by Age, U.S., Rate
I quote these rates in percentages so as not to confuse them with the death counts above.
Above each table, I have a row with the male-to-female ratio of the overall death rates.
Females
Males
Now one can make head-to-head comparisons.
First, the least disparity in overall mortality is at the very youngest and oldest ages. The worst mortality gap is for ages 15-24 (which I like to call the “fatal stupidity period” — mind you, females are doing plenty of stupid stuff during this age period as well, it just tends to lead to other-than-fatal consequences.)
For ages 15-24, for both males and females, the top causes of death are accidents, suicide, and homicide. But the rates are very different, with rates 3 - 5 times higher for those causes. Overall, males have a death rate of 2.61x the female death rate for that age group.
For so many of these causes of death, except for very few, the male death rate exceeds the female death rate for the same age groups, sometimes by quite a lot.
In some of these cases (as with suicide, homicide, and accidents), the cause-effect link for the gap is fairly clear in terms of direct behavior. For cancer and heart disease, smoking differences had a large explanatory effect, but that’s not the only issue.
In the cases of some mortality, we don’t know the mechanism. For example, COVID death rates were much higher for males than females. This difference was seen with the first major SARS epidemic.
Then there are the handful of causes of death, beyond the obvious (pregnancy-related causes), where females have higher death rates, like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and some other specific diseases.
