Death Rates

Some hospitals are better than others. But for many years all patients had to go on was reputation, doctors' advice, word of mouth and advertising. Today, California follows some other states, the federal government and a few private groups in offering a window on hospital quality. The study by state officials of hospital death rates shows that for eight common conditions and procedures -- including stroke, hip fracture and brain surgery -- the rates vary widely. The study looked at mortality rates for 2007 and 2006.

More teen drivers are dying in traffic accidents. A state-by-state look at teen driver fatalities by the Governors Highway Safety Assn. found that 16- and 17-year-old driver deaths increased from 202 to 240 during the first half of 2012, a 19% jump from the same period in the previous year. It marks a reversal in declining teen driver death rates attributed to the introduction of graduated license systems in many states.  Such systems place restrictions - such as the number of passengers allowed in a vehicle - on teen driver licenses that are gradually lifted as the teens age and gain more driving experience.  The governors' association said the increase mirrored projections by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in which all traffic deaths increased by 8% during the same period.  That's attributed to increased driving that is a result of an improving U.S. economy.

A standard blood test for kidney functioning may indicate a heightened risk of dying within eight years among people with high blood pressure, a study suggests. The study, of 10,768 people with high blood pressure, found that those with high levels of creatinine, a waste product produced by muscle tissue, in their blood showed higher death rates from heart attack and stroke as well as kidney disease, the researchers said. Death rates rose with rising creatinine levels. Kidneys normally remove creatinine from blood, so high levels can signal kidney trouble.

Cancer death rates among African American men declined faster than those of white men in the last decade, even though overall survival rates for black men and women remained the lowest of all racial groups for most types of cancer, according to a recent report. In a study published Tuesday in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, researchers found that while the racial gap was closing for lung and smoking-related cancers, as well as prostate cancer, the disparity between black and white patients was widening for colorectal cancer and breast cancer.  "To the extent to which these disparities reflect unequal access to healthcare versus other factors remains an active area of research," wrote lead author Carol DeSantis, an epidemiologist with the American Cancer Society.

The gap in life expectancy between black and white Americans is smaller than it has ever been, thanks largely to a decline in the number of deaths resulting from heart disease and HIV infection, a new analysis has found. That's the good news. The bad news is that the gap is still large: A black baby boy born today can expect to live 5.4 fewer years, on average, than his white counterpart, and a black baby girl will die 3.7 years earlier, on average, than her white counterpart. What's more, the narrowing of the gap between 2003 and 2008 is due in part to a troubling development among whites: They are more likely than in the past to die from overdoses of powerful prescription medications like OxyContin and Vicodin, along with other unintentional poisonings.

Anesthesia is not an area of medicine most folks profess to understand. As one anesthesiologist put it: "The lay public has the notion that we knock people on the head and they go to sleep, and then we knock them on the head again and they wake up." But today, even doctors are realizing how little they know about the effects of heavy sedation.

Red state voters are more likely to die in a traffic accident than blue state voters. That's the finding of FairWarning.org, an online, nonprofit publication that does public interest journalism. “The 10 states with the highest fatality rates all were red, while all but one of the 10 lowest fatality states were blue. What's more, the place with the nation's lowest fatality rate, while not a state, was the very blue District of Columbia,” FairWarning said in an article published Tuesday.

Maneuvering a 4,000-pound machine made of aluminum and steel at highway speeds leaves little room for human error and more than enough room for the possibility of danger. So perhaps it should come as little surprise that motor vehicle crashes remained a leading cause of death in the United States in 2009. According to a new report, they accounted for 34,485 deaths. The new data, released by the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found that urban areas like Los Angeles and New York had lower death rates due to car crashes than rural areas.

Using an annual chest X-ray to screen for a deadly disease such as lung cancer might seem to make some sense. But the tactic simply does not save lives. The findings allow researchers to move to the next big question regarding early lung-cancer detection: whether annual CT screening (computed tomography) can lower death rates. In a new study, researchers led by the University of Minnesota examined data from more than 154,000 people. Half of the participants, ages 55 to 74, were assigned to have annual chest X-rays while the other participants received their usual care.

Death rates surveyed recently at two Somali locations, Baidoa and Afgoi, are among the highest ever documented in a famine-affected area, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. The overall death rate in Baidoa from April to December was 16.9 deaths daily per 10,000 people and 30.1 deaths daily for children 5 and under, according to the Dec. 11 issue of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. The survey also found: * Between Aug. 9 and Nov.

This year's Annual Report to the Nation on the Status of Cancer, released online Monday, brought Americans good news and bad.  Extending a trend since the early 1990s, authors reported in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute that cancer deaths have continued to fall in the United States, with rates declining 1.5% per year for all cancers, in both sexes combined, from 2000 to 2009.  Deaths from the most common cancers - including lung,...

A Lake Tahoe-area resort ski patrol member for nearly 30 years, Bill Foster would have understood the dangers of avalanches better than most. But even knowing the exact date and time of a planned avalanche didn't save the 53-year-old's life. Moments after another member of the ski team set off an avalanche with explosives late Monday morning as part of an effort to reduce the risk of an unpredictable avalanche, Foster was buried in Alpine Meadows. He had taken cover in an area that history had suggested would be safe from the rolling snow.

Many social, economic and cultural factors divide states that tilt Republican from those that tilt Democratic. Now a website has uncovered a new and unexpected divide -- red states tend to have much higher traffic fatality rates than blue ones. Partisans may try to torture a political explanation out of this data. Liberals might argue that friends don't let friends drive conservative. But the facts point toward a more prosaic explanation: Many "red states" offer up higher speed limits, longer drives and greater distances to hospitals and emergency services.

It doesn't matter if you live in Los Angeles or in Massachusetts, you're more likely to die of a heart-related problem such as heart attack, heart failure or stroke when the weather is (relatively) cold. Researchers looked at death records from seven different U.S. locations -- L.A, Massachusetts, Texas, Arizona, Georgia, Washington and Pennsylvania -- and found a consistent pattern "across the board," said Dr. Robert Kloner, a cardiologist at the Heart Institute at Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles and a collaborator in a study presented Wednesday at the American Heart Assn.'s Scientific Sessions 2012.

Cancer has become the leading cause of death among U.S. Latinos, nosing past heart disease in 2009, researchers at the American Cancer Society reported Monday. For most demographic groups - and for the country as a whole - heart disease is the top killer, claiming a total of 599,413 American lives in 2009, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That same year, the most recent year for which statistics are available, 567,628 Americans died of cancer. Among Latinos that year, the rankings were reversed: 29,935 died of cancer and 29,611 of heart disease, according to a study in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians.

Maneuvering a 4,000-pound machine made of aluminum and steel at highway speeds leaves little room for human error and more than enough room for the possibility of danger. So perhaps it should come as little surprise that motor vehicle crashes remained a leading cause of death in the United States in 2009. According to a new report, they accounted for 34,485 deaths. The new data, released by the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found that urban areas like Los Angeles and New York had lower death rates due to car crashes than rural areas.

Re "Transplant Inequality: Death by Geography," June 11 The Times' presentation of the geographic imbalances that persist in transplantation illustrates nicely the challenges in seeking a balance of equity, geography and medicine. One geographic factor that merits consideration is that death rates, which are a crude but correlated predictor of potential donors, vary significantly across the country, with California's being 6.7 per thousand while Florida's is 10. Pulsatile perfusion can extend kidney storage time to 48 hours or longer following organ recovery and allow national allocation of perfect-match kidneys.

Asthma deaths have risen steadily in the United States, with the highest rate among black male children, researchers say. Asthma afflicts an estimated 9.9 million people in the United States and "affects children, blacks and the poor disproportionately," researchers said in this week's Journal of the American Medical Assn. The researchers noted that, from 1968 almost through the 1970s, the nation's asthma mortality rates declined.

Deaths of mothers giving birth in developing countries have dropped by nearly half since 1990, while deaths of children under 5 have fallen from 12 million to 7.6 million, according to a new report released Wednesday by the United Nations Children's Fund(UNICEF). A few countries have made "spectacular progress" toward lowering death rates, but some others have made virtually no progress at all, according to the report, Building a Future for Women and Children, which was published under the auspices of the Countdown to 2015 Initiative.