How this is calculated
This site shows the most common eventual causes of death for a group of people who share your country, age, and sex. It is a population statistic, not a prediction about you as an individual.
What the number means
Pick a country, an age, and a sex, and the site answers one question: among people like that who are alive today, what share will eventually die of each cause? So a figure of "about 1 in 6" for cancer means that of a large group of similar people, roughly one in six are projected to die of cancer at some point, not that it will happen this year or to you.
Rank order is more reliable than the exact figures. The percentages are projections with real uncertainty, so treat them as approximate.
Where the data comes from
World Health Organization data, covering 2000 to 2021, across about 185 countries:
- Life tables from the WHO Global Health Observatory, which describe how likely people are to survive from one age to the next. These cover every country.
- Cause-of-death data comes from one of two sources, depending on the country. For countries with detailed, near-complete death registration we use the WHO Mortality Database, national records of what people actually died of, coded in fine detail by cause and five-year age. For the rest we fall back to the WHO Global Health Estimates, WHO's own modeled figures, which use broader age bands and less cause detail. Results built on the modeled figures are labelled as a regional modeled estimate and are treated as less certain.
Either way, we reassign ill-defined codes onto real causes the way WHO does, so the ranking is not distorted.
How the projection works
We look at how death rates and the mix of causes have changed over the last two decades in each country, and carry those trends forward. Then, for a person alive at your age today, we follow a group like you through the rest of their lives on those projected rates, adding up the chance of eventually dying of each cause. Because everyone dies of something, the shares add up to 100 percent.
This is a genuine look forward, not a snapshot of who dies at your age now. A young adult is far more likely to die of an injury this year than of heart disease, but over a whole lifetime the long-term diseases dominate, and that is what the projection reflects.
Limitations
- For countries without detailed death registration the figures rest on WHO's modeled estimates, which are coarser and less certain; these results are labelled as such in the tool.
- The figures are model projections, most uncertain far into the future and for rare causes.
- Ages are grouped in five-year bands, and everyone over 85 is treated as one band, so the oldest ages are coarse.
- Causes are shown in groups; tap a group to see the specific causes within it.
- Country-level figures hide large differences within a country.