A former colleague of mine maintained throughout his career that the most logical way for family physicians to provide preventive services for adults was to focus on the most common causes of death. Although the top diagnoses leading to death recorded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2021 were heart disease, cancer, and COVID-19, that’s not what he meant. Instead, he was speaking of the “ actual causes of death ,” or the behavioral causes of the causes, which from 1990 to 2017 were tobacco use, poor diets, and physical inactivity . Clinicians can have the largest effect on preventing death in adults by counseling patients to stop smoking, eat healthier foods, and exercise. What about children and adolescents? All-cause mortality in Americans aged 1 to 19 years has been increasing since 2019 , partially due to COVID-19 but mostly from a rise in fatal injuries that began prior to the pandemic. Motor vehicle accidents, which have long been the top cause of death in ...
