Ever ask someone how their family member passed away and hear them say they simply "died of old age"?
As it turns out, that's almost never quite what's going on from a medical perspective. Aging — in and of itself — is not a cause of death.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention keeps track of what people actually die from in the United States. In 2020, the CDC said the number one cause of death for people over the age of 65 in the US was heart disease, followed by cancer, COVID-19, cerebrovascular disease (which often leads to strokes), and Alzheimer's.
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These "old age" fatalities are often quiet deaths, like what happens when you hear an older person's heart stopped in their sleep. That usually means the person had a heart attack in the middle of the night. Another example is if someone "had a bad fall, and it was just downhill from there." The person likely broke a hip, survived the surgery, but then got pneumonia and died as a result of their infection.
Often, what claims the lives of older people can be an accumulation of things. Sometimes this is referred to as "geriatric failure to thrive," a kind of catchall phrase for elderly patients who may have a bunch of interrelated issues, including trouble with moving, eating, depression, and cognitive impairment.
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"As you get older and older, you're more likely to get heart disease and cancer," Amy Ehrlich, a professor of clinical medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and a geriatric physician at Montefiore Medical Center, previously told Insider. "But we also see a lot of things like falls, where someone falls and ends up with serious trauma like a hip fracture. That's hard to recover from when you're 104."
If we don't die as a result of aging, then what the heck is aging?
Humans didn't always live reliably long enough to age. People used to die frequently long before their skin began to sag or their muscles began to wither, succumbing instead to diseases for which we now have vaccines, like tuberculosis or smallpox. Some people died from gastrointestinal infections, which can cause diarrhea. In many countries around the world, diarrhea is still a leading cause of death in kids, along with malaria, and pneumonia.
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Somewhere around the 1950s (at least in the US, and other wealthy countries), we started living nearly twice as long as our ancestors had just a century before. We now spend a massive portion of our lives getting old before we die, though in recent years, life expectancy has been declining — a trend that started before the COVID-19 pandemic began.
Other living organisms don't age
What if we experienced aging without death as the final outcome — or didn't age at all? That's how some animals do it.
A 2014 study comparing the mortality rates of 46 different species found that some organisms don't age — their mortality rates stay constant from around the time they're born until around the time they die. Others enter a period of aging (like the kind most of us experience around age 65) and then come out of it, continuing their lives.
Here's a chart from that study showing what aging looks like in a modern-day human (far left). Mortality rates here are in red, fertility rates are in blue:
That sharp rise in the thin red line says: We have an incredibly long aging period.
But lots of other creatures' life spans look nothing like this. Take a look, for example, at the "immortal" hydra (second column, second row), a tiny freshwater animal that lives to be 1,400 years old. It's just as likely to die at age 10 as it is at age 1,000:
Nature
The desert tortoise has a high mortality rate in early life, after which the tortoise death rate actually declines with age.
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What does this mean for people who want to live forever?
Some scientists think we can use this knowledge of the natural world to stop aging, or at least prolong human life.
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"Aging is not a relentless process that leads to death," Michael Rose, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California at Irvine and the director of its Network for Experimental Research on Evolution, previously told Insider. (Rose has published a series of papers and books on aging and evolution.) "It's a transitional phase of life between being amazingly healthy, and stabilizing."
But we are not hydra nor tortoises, and, for now, we can't do away with human aging. For us, aging is real, and it is long. Fortunately, many older people can still live healthy, happy lives.
This story has been updated. It was originally published in 2016.
People don't die of old age. Instead, as people age they become more vulnerable to disease and health conditions that a younger person may be able to survive. These unavoidable changes in the body lower a person's intrinsic capacity, which makes them more likely to have a serious problem if they get a disease.
Aging — in and of itself — is not a cause of death. When most of us say that someone died of old age, what we really mean is that someone died as a result of an illness (like pneumonia) or as a result of an event (like a heart attack) that a healthy, stronger, younger person would likely have survived.
People in their 60s are tricky to classify. They are not commonly thought of as young, but they did not get to be really old either. A death in one's 70s is more-or-less accepted as normal, and the 80s are widely considered to be ripe old age and a very full life.
Biological immortality is an absence of aging. Specifically it is the absence of a sustained increase in rate of mortality as a function of chronological age. A cell or organism that does not experience aging, or ceases to age at some point, is biologically immortal.
Some of the older persons even portrayed death as a relief from life and thus something to long for. The older persons had varied thoughts about what would happen after death. Some wished they had a faith to be comforted by, and some hoped for life after death and the ability to rest near and dear family and friends.
A natural death is when a person dies due to old age or a medical condition, as opposed to dying by a tragic accident. And while some people do experience pain with death, others experience no pain at all. It varies from person to person.
Your body stiffens, first, at your face and neck. The stiffening progresses to the trunk of your body and gradually radiates outward to your arms and legs and then your fingers and toes. Your body loosens again. A few days after death, your body's tissue breaks down, causing the stiff parts to relax again.
Most of us seem to know that the average American lives between 70 and 80 years: 73.5 years for men, and 79.3 for women, to be exact. Fewer of us understand that life expectancy rises with age. An American man who turns 70 today will live to 85, on average. A woman of 70 will live to 87.
Most deaths in people over 65 are indeed “natural deaths,” because they're caused by natural factors like disease. But saying someone died of “natural causes” or “old age” isn't specific and can mislead people into thinking that age itself will cause death.
While some researchers contend that a natural limit sits around 120, 140, or 150 years, others speculate that a limit doesn't exist—and that aging doesn't necessarily lead to death.
Some scientists believe that within the next few decades, it could be possible for humans to live 1,000 years or more. Normally, as time passes, our cells undergo changes: Our DNA mutates, cells stop dividing, and harmful junk—by-products of cellular activity—builds up. All these processes together cause us to age.
LONDON — Queen Elizabeth II died of “old age,” according to her death certificate, which was released on Thursday by the registrar general of Scotland. The certificate, which lists her occupation as Her Majesty the Queen, also notes that the queen died at 3:10 p.m. on Sept. 8 at Balmoral Castle.
The studies claim that death anxiety peaks in men and women when in their 20s, but after this group, sex plays a role in the path that one takes. Either sex can experience a decline in death concerns with age, but the studies show an unexpected second spike in women during their early 50s.
Other experiences that could make you fearful of death include being exposed to death at a young age (e.g., suddenly losing someone close to you), having a traumatic experience (e.g., witnessing an accident or being involved in a war), or experiencing serious harm or illness as a child.
Approximately 6 months before the end of life, the body often reveals specific physical symptoms vital to the approaching transition. One notable symptom is extreme fatigue, which becomes a constant companion due to the body's adaptive response to changing circ*mstances.
Heart disease was the top cause of death for people 65 and older between 2020 and 2021 in 47 states and Washington, DC. In the other three states — Alaska, Minnesota, and Oregon — cancer was the leading cause.
Muscle fibres reduce in number and shrink in size. Muscle tissue is replaced more slowly and lost muscle tissue is replaced with a tough, fibrous tissue. Changes in the nervous system cause muscles to have reduced tone and ability to contract.
Being a non-smoker, eating a healthy diet, exercising regularly and limiting alcohol consumption can reduce your risk of many potentially lethal diseases such as heart disease, stroke and cancer.
According to 2015 age-specific mortality rates, almost 60 percent of the 2015 birth cohort will live past 80, while more than 20 percent will die before 70.
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