how we age & die
Aug. 4th, 2008 11:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)

This blog post by Jane Gross has been sitting in my brain for almost a month. It starts with the question, "How many of you expect to die?", but really it's about how you'd like to die.
And no, it's not about living wills. It's about three of the most common ways that old people die, and the trajectory and duration of each scenario.
Cancer deaths, which peak at age 65, usually come after many years of good health followed by a few weeks or months of steep decline [and affects 20 percent of Americans.]Gross quotes her mother's attitude on the subject: "The reward for living past age 85 and avoiding all the killer diseases, she said, is that you get to rot to death instead."
Deaths from organ failure, generally heart or lung disease, peak among patients 10 years older, killing about one in four Americans around age 75 after a far bumpier course.
The third option, death following extended frailty and dementia, is everyone’s worst nightmare, an interminable and humiliating series of losses for the patient, and an exhausting and potentially bankrupting ordeal for the family. Approximately 40 percent of Americans, generally past age 85, follow this course [...] and the percentage will grow with improvements in prevention and treatment of cancer, heart disease and pulmonary disease.
It's not a happy topic, but it's something to think about sometimes.