In our recent video about the leading causes of death throughout history, we got a bunch of comments telling us that we neglected to mention one of the biggest killers of all: old age. But there’s a reason we left it out: from a medical perspective, “dying of old age” doesn’t technically exist. Hi I’m David and this is MinuteEarth.
As you get older, lots of not so good things happen to your body: your tissues don’t heal as quickly, the walls of your blood vessels thicken, your cells get worse at fixing errors, and your immune system gets weaker. So if you fall down, you’re more likely to bleed internally; if plaque builds up in your arteries, it’s more likely to cause a heart attack; if a cell mutates, you’re much more likely to get cancer; and if you get a cold, it’s much more likely to turn into pneumonia. So while being old makes you more vulnerable to all sorts of health problems, death itself is always caused by a specific malady…”old age” alone can’t actually kill you.
But you used to be able to die of old age – at least officially. Really old people are pretty vulnerable, so they are often suffering from lots of these potentially-fatal maladies at the end. When they do die, without doing invasive post-mortem tests or autopsies, it's often difficult to figure out which one struck the fatal blow, so “old age” was a useful catch-all cause of death for doctors to use – hence the widespread use of the phrase.
Nowadays, for statistical, legal, and medical purposes, physicians in most places are required to fill out forms that include a “specific cause of death”, so even if there are lots of different suspects, they have to at least guess which one was the particular killer. But that’s not universal – in 2022, the queen officially died of old age. Which does sound like a gentle way to go; that’s another reason that so many of us think you can die of just being old.
You’d probably rather hear that your great grandma died because it was her time, rather than to know the gory details about, say, the blood clot that moved to her brain and starved it of oxygen while she was sleeping, which in turn caused her heart to stop beating. But while you might not want to hear about that, it IS important information for doctors. After all, they need to know what tends to kill old people in order to develop treatments that combat these ailments – or even just delay their deadliness.
So that in the future, old age isn’t something you die from; it’s something you live for.
