AIBU?
Iknowtheanswer · 05/05/2021 06:36
We used to see old age as a cause of death onoads of death certificates, then I think the guidance changed and doctors were advised to be more specific.
Where someone is in their late 90s/early 100s, however, old age will be an accurate cause of death. Everything just stops working.
iloveeverykindofcat · 05/05/2021 06:54
Well yeah, technically there's always a 'final cause' of death. But if you think about what aging actually is you can see it as a sort of accumulation of small errors - when cells copy themselves they don't do it perfectly, so over time more and more mistakes creep in, until finally the system is overwhelmed. In my layman's understanding that's what death from old age is. Some people age more slowly than others depending on the rate of cell replication and number and severity of the errors. Biologists feel free to correct if totally wrong.
Quartz2208 · 05/05/2021 07:00
Yep my Nan (died last year in Jan before COVID at 90) had it as the top cause of death on her certificate along with a number of other ailments (including from memory a couple of infections) that had her body not been so worn down due to age she would have survived.
zigaziga · 05/05/2021 07:13
@GlassBoxSpectacular
So unless you catch a disease/develop an illness, you’ll live indefinitely?
And naming a specific illness surely just sounds like something killed them that shouldn’t have? We should have caught it earlier, we should have fixed it, they shouldn’t have died...
We often see x or y people die from cancer / heart disease a day / week / year in the U.K. stats and generally presented as a BAD NUMBER that we want to see coming down. For these numbers to ever even be remotely meaningful you’ve got to have another option surely - died of old age?
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