- Students from the University of California, San Diego, created a report detailing what Americans think with kill them versus what actually kills them.
- Rates for 13 common causes of death were compared with Google search trends.
- The report revealed people are far more worried about things that have low mortality rates when they should be worried about things such as heart.
We spend a great deal of time worrying about things, turning to Dr Google to asks about our risks of terrorism or homicide or cancer.
But a new study has laid bare that our hypochondria may be slightly misplaced: most of us fret over some rare killers, while ignoring the biggest and most likely threats, such as heart disease.
To lay bare this disparity, undergraduate students at the University of California, San Diego, compiled graphs on the leading causes of death in the US and the top Google searches about death.
The analysis revealed that cardiovascular disease is far and away the biggest danger facing Americans, but the vast majority are disproportionately worried about terrorism, despite its very low mortality rates.
The irony, public health experts say, is that the public's fixation on unlikely causes of death means we are less likely to worry about or act on very real threats - which could make it even more of a risk.
Students from the University of California at San Diego set out to see if the public attention given to causes of death was similar to the actual distribution of deaths. The average percentage for 13 leading causes of death between 1999 and 2016 are shown above
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**Actual mortality rates were compared with Google data indicating how much the public searched for each cause, the rates for which are shown in the table above**
For the project titled Death: Reality vs. Reported, four students in a computational science class at UC San Diego asked three questions:
- How do people die?
- How do people think we die?
- Is there a difference?
To answer those questions they compiled a list of the top 10 most common causes of death from 1999 to 2016 according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data.
They also included an additional three items that received a lot of public attention: terrorism, opioid overdose and homicides.
The statistics were then cross-referenced with data from Google Trends beginning in 2004 that show what kinds of things people were worried about dying from.
They students got the idea for the project from a 1979 study that looked at how often different causes of death were covered by news outlets compared with the how often people died from each.
'We set out to see if the public attention given to causes of death was similar to the actual distribution of deaths,' the authors said on the project website.
'After looking at our data, we found that, like results before us, the attention given by news outlets and Google searches does not match the actual distribution of deaths.
'This suggests that general public sentiment is not well-calibrated with the ways that people actually die.
'Heart disease and kidney disease appear largely underrepresented in the sphere of public attention, while terrorism and homicides capture a far larger share, relative to their share of deaths caused.'
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