Heart disease and cancer kill half of the 100,000 people (give or take a few thousand) who die in Illinois every year. But the state lags in dealing with these medical conditions.
We’re No. 31 in the nation when it comes to the rate at which people perish from the two blockbuster illnesses, according to data published recently by National Center for Health Statistics.
A bunch of Southern states, a few on the East Coast, and several Midwestern neighbors bring up the bottom.
The gap between below- and above-average performers isn’t trivial; it affects whether people live or die . In No. 1 ranked Minnesota, age-adjusted fatalities from heart disease were 141.5 per 100,000 people, compared with 214.3 in Illinois. For cancer, No. 1 ranked Utah’s death rate was 139.4; ours was 190.1.
Of course, how many people succumb to illness in any area depends on many factors, including consumers’ lifestyles and health habits, access to medical care, genetics, poverty, the environment, demographic trends, and more. Some of the spread between Illinois and top-rated states can be explained by these variables.
But there’s plenty of room for action. The things that make us vulnerable to illness—known as “risk factors”—can be mitigated if doctors focus on prevention, if people eat well and exercise, if public health programs are effective, and if good medical services are readily available, research shows.
To save lives, Illinois needs to make a concerted push to do better in all those areas, experts suggest.
Asked for a response, the Illinois Department of Public Health sent along a long list of programs. With a few exceptions, there’s no information on what impact these programs have had (is this being measured?) or where they’re available (what was the department thinking?). You’ll find an abridged list at the end of this posting.
Back to the government’s “cause of death” data, I spotted a question that deserves some scrutiny: Why do Illinois patients die of septicemia, a frequently fatal blood infection, five times more often than those in California? (Illinois’ rate is 11th worst in the nation.) Does anyone have an answer?
Looking at state-by-state rankings, Illinois would also do well to focus on kidney disease, which my colleague Deborah L. Shelton spotlighted recently in a front-page report. The state’s death rate is 13th highest in the country.
For those of you who like the raw numbers, here’s the top 10 causes of the 103,654 deaths in Illinois in 2005, the most recent year for which comprehensive data is available:
1. Heart disease: 28,226.
2. Cancer: 24,250.
3. Stroke: 6,252.
4. Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 5,067.
5. Accidents/unintentional injuries: 4,182.
6. Diabetes: 3,034.
7. Alzheimer’s disease: 2,827.
8. Influenza/pneumonia: 2,949.
9. Kidney disease: 2,402.
10. Septicemia: 1,943.
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