MORTALITY TRENDS

• Trends in national mortality rates •

Graphs showing time trends in mortality rates

Choose a graph

Select a country, cause of death, and age range, then press the "Go" button:

Place

Cause of death

(For information about these causes of death, click here.)

Age range, years
<1 year
1-14 years
15-34 years
35-49 years
50-59 years
60-69 years
70-79 years
"Middle age": 35-69 years

(Why these age ranges? See the FAQ.)

'Whenever a large sample of chaotic elements are taken in hand… an unsuspected and most beautiful form of regularity proves to have been latent all along.'

—Francis Galton, quoted by Peter Bernstein in Against the Gods (1996)

Mortality trends for all causes of death:

age 35-69 years, United Kingdom

Specified graph showing trends in national mortality rates

Legend: Any faint vertical lines which may be visible in the main plotting area indicate years in which the country changed its coding of causes of death to a new version of the International Classification of Diseases.

Method: Mortality rates were calculated using data from the World Health Organization and the United Nations Population Division, then standardised for age (by taking unweighted averages of component rates) and smoothed (as weighted 3-year moving averages). For details, see the Info page.

Caution: Trends can reflect not only changes in disease occurrence or treatment, but also changes in how a cause of death is defined or coded. (The same factors can also account for differences in mortality rates between different countries.) Those due to changes in definition or coding are artefacts, and may be indicated here by dotted (or thin) lines. But, many artefactual trends have no such indication.