The Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) reported on Wednesday, 11 Kislev the various causes of death in Israel in recent years, and shows an amazing victory over heart disease.

In all, in 2002, 44,266 residents died in Israel, which is half a percent of Israel’s population for that year. 50.4% of the deceased were males, and 49.5% were females. 81% of the deceased were over age 65 (of which 66% were over the age of 75 and 38% were over the age of 85). 6% of the deceased were under the age of 45, 1.3% of the deceased (561) were infants up to the age of one year.

According to the data, the ten most common causes of death for 2015 caused 72% of all deaths in that year.

About a quarter (25.1%) of all the deceased died of cancer and 23.5% of all cardiovascular diseases. Heart disease (without rheumatic heart disease) killed 14.4% of the deceased. Infectious diseases and diabetes accounted for 5.7% of all deaths (each), and of cerebrovascular diseases (5.5%). It should be noted that security events (about 100) and road accidents (about 350) do not even scratch the first ten and are all included under the definition of “external causes”, which also includes work accidents and suicides.

More Arabs Die than Jews

The distribution of causes of death is different between the Jewish population and the Arab population in Israel shows that in absolute numbers. The number of deaths among Jews from diseases is higher. While cancerous infections account for 25.3% of deaths among Jews, among Arabs they cause 21.1% of deaths. Diabetes, the third most common cause of death among Arabs, accounts for 7.5% of deaths in this population group, compared with 5.5% among Jews. Some of the differences in the distribution of causes of death between Jews and Arabs stem from differences in age distribution between the two populations – the Arab population is younger.

If we compare the size of the population and its average age, the adjusted age- mortality rate among Arabs is 1.4 times that of the Jews. Comparing the standardized mortality rates among Jews and Arabs with the leading causes of death shows that the mortality rates from cancer are almost equal in both populations. The adjusted mortality rates from diabetes and chronic diseases of lower respiratory tracts are 2.2 times higher among Arabs than among Jews.

The mortality rate from kidney disease, heart disease, cerebrovascular disease, and all external causes is higher among Arabs than among Jews (1.9, 1.8, 1.7, and 1.4, respectively). For all external reasons, the greatest differences between Jews and Arabs are road accidents, suicides and murder. The adjusted death rate from road accidents among Arabs was 2.1 times higher than among Jews and regarding murder 6.8 times higher than among Jews. On the other hand, the rate of suicide among Jews was 3.7 times higher than for Arabs.

Victory over heart disease

A multi-year graph shows that since the beginning of the 1980s there has been a significant drop in mortality from heart disease, similar to the decline observed in the Western world. Mortality rates from cancer have been volatile over the years, but the overall trend is a very moderate decline. As a result, at the end of the 1990s there was a reversal of leading causes of death – that malignant neoplasms (cancer) became the main cause of death and then heart disease.

Mortality rates from infectious diseases have risen mainly in the last decade, and these diseases have become the third most common cause of death in 2015, just before diabetes. The main cause of death from the infectious diseases group is sepsis, and in the last decade it accounts for 80% of all infectious diseases that cause death. Diabetes mortality rates have increased over the years, and it has become the fourth most common cause of death, just before cerebrovascular disease. As in heart disease, mortality rates from cerebrovascular diseases have also declined in recent decades, a decline that began in the early 1970s.

(YWN – Israel Desk, Jerusalem)