Ten Leading Causes of Death, Ages 1-44, United States, 2005-2014

Theoretical Background and research questions/hypothesis:  Injury is the leading cause of death for ages 1-44. Each year for the past ten years, the CDC’s Injury Center has published charts that list the ten leading causes of death. However, the causes for the annual burden of injury deaths ages 1-44 have changed over the past ten years. Can changes in the burden of injury death be efficiently visualized with a graphic that captures ten years of data? The purpose of this presentation is to use visual analytics to show trends across the annual data, conveying a story of how the leading causes of death changed over the past ten years (2005-2014).

Methods:  This project uses mortality data from the leading causes of death, ages 1-44. In order to visualize the burden of injury death, compared to other leading causes of death, this project uses visual analytics to show all ten years of mortality data (2005-2014) in a single ten-year graphic. The ten-year graphic combines data from the annual leading causes of death charts made with CDC’s Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System (WISQARS).

Results:  The resulting graphic demonstrates that unintentional injury has been the leading cause of death, ages 1-44, for ten years (2005-2014). The graphic efficiently visualizes the burden of unintentional injury death as substantially larger than that of other leading causes of death over the past ten years. The consistently large burden of unintentional injury death over the past ten years contrasts with the decreasing burden of non-injury causes of death, such as cancer and heart disease (for ages 1-44). Additional results in the graphic include that suicide mortality moved from the 4th (2005) to the 2nd (2014) leading cause of death, overtaking cancer and heart disease (for ages 1-44).

Conclusions:  By using visual analytics to show trends across a ten-year history of mortality data, this graphic efficiently visualizes the burden of unintentional injury as substantially and historically larger than that of non-injury leading causes of death. While the ten-year graphic does not replace the need for annual leading causes of death charts, it enhances their value by conveying the consistently large burden of unintentional injury as the leading cause of death, ages 1-44, for ten years (2005-2014), and it allows users to see the nature of the change in one visual. The ten-year graphic also offers the potential for future updates, alongside annually updated charts.

Implications for research and/or practice:  This project has implications for health communication by using visual analytics to show that unintentional injury has been the leading cause of death, ages 1-44, for ten years (2005-2014). The ten-year graphic presents a visually compelling story that compares the ten leading causes of death and focuses the key message on the substantially and historically larger burden of injury. By observing changes in the leading causes of death charts over time, we can better target and evaluate the impact of injury prevention messages.