I remember hearing and reading about how people (when chronologically and physically very elderly) would just die of “old age”.
Is this term still in use or is it always nowadays attributable to some specific cause? Did dying of old age (as a term) somehow become politically incorrect as so many other terms and words have?
I don’t think it’s about PC; I think we simply know more about the proximate causes of death. The fundamental cause of a death may be old age, but now we can say which organ failed or which blood vessel burst.
What Der Trihs said. Often we’ll get elderly patients who have nothing objectivly wrong with them who just refuse to eat, eventually they slip into a coma and die (usually over a period of days - weeks). They’re the closest these days to people actually dying of “old age” as opposed to anything else.
Most people die of some sort of major organ failure; heart, lungs, liver, etc. Again, it’s pretty much just old age but we can pinpoint exactly what failed.
Almost 10 years ago my grandma died of an unspecified malady. Basically she was suffering from fevers of unknown origin and after a few months quietly slipped away. The Doc told us that she had simply died of old age. On the death cirtificate he put “natural causes.”
I understand that if nothing else gets you, pneumonia will. They used to call it the “old man’s friend”, since it’s not a terribly bad way to go. I imagine that many of the people who “died of old age” back in the day actually died of pneumonia, or a heart attack, that sort of thing. Now we’re just more specific on what we call it.
Also, way back in the day if you had severe Alzheimer’s you would either die through starvation, dehydration or an aspiration pneumonia. Now we use PEG tubes and some of these patients may live a little longer, before they too die of dehydration, starvation or aspiration pneumonia.
“Natural causes” isn’t a good thing to put on a death certificate, neither is “cardiovascular arrest” , “respiratory arrest” or “pneumonia”. In this country, the coroner would probably reject those death certificates and hold an inquiry into the probable cause of death.
:dubious:
If 80 year old man drops dead one dead, whyn not out natural causes or respitory arrest? There’s may be no proximal cause except that the body got so worn down it just stopped.
I think subjects like this should be banned or carry a TMI warning. 
Er, you couldn’t tell from the title that it was going to be about dying of old age?
Oh, boo hoo. It’s one of life’s stages, deal with it.
smiling bandit-that’s the point, there may be no cause, but there might be.
Here are the rules for the UK and Ireland about Coroner’s cases.
The Coroner must be notified in ALL of the following situations:
Someone dies in hospital unexpectedly
Someone dies and medical malpractice is suspected
Someone dies within 24 hours of surgery
Someone dies from an accident, misadventure, suicide, homicide or in suspicious circumstances.
Someone dies at home if they haven’t seen a doctor within 2 weeks (a month in Ireland).
Someone dies at home when under the care of a doctor if the death was unexpected.
Let’s say I have an elderly lady of 90, who fell down the stairs 6 months ago and broke her hip. She has been in hospital since and died from pneumonia, secondary to immobility following the fracture.
That’s a Coroner’s case, as the cause of death was directly related to the fall, and it would still have to be determined whether that was misadventure, a suicide attempt or a homicide attempt.
The Coroner has the power to order an autopsy and an inquest. They may not do it in all cases, but would certainly consider an autopsy in the case of an otherwise healthy 80year old who was discovered dead at home.
How do you know for sure that the cause of death was by natural causes unless you investigate properly.
Interesting what you say about the coroner not liking ‘natural causes’ Irishgiril.
My Mum was a GP in a run down English mining town for almost 30 years, she was the only female doctor in the practice she tended to get a lot of the ‘old dears’ on her list. Sadly for many of the old folk (male and female) she was one of the few visitors they had. (She’d do DVs for repeat 'scripts etc.) Anyway that aside I do remember her saying on more than one occasion how she hated not being able to put ‘cause of death - old age’ on the death cert., they were ‘ready to go’ as it were and searching around for a precise reason was pointless and depressing.
Argh! Post evaporation!
Logic and sanity for one. People die constantly all over the place, and coroners have no time to investigate them all. Some elderly lady dropped dead? Some hopital flunky looks her over for a minute and sends her to the funeral home. Some elderly gent clutches his chest and keels over? Some hopital flunky looks her over for a minute and sends him to the funeral home.
Unless there’s some reason to suspect foul play, they aren’t going to spend more than a minute looking, if that. This may sound callous to you. I think it’s pretty well a good idea for our collective sanity.
Smiling Bandit: Unlikely as it may seem, old people DON’T just drop dead with no warning.
If there’s no history of heart disease, diabetes, cancer, COAD or infection, you can’t just assume that it was natural causes. Sometimes, even when there is such a history, it’s not a good idea to make assumptions.
Case in point:
All bodies donated to medical science for dissection by medical schools should not be autopsied. For that reason, in Ireland all of our bodies are of very elderly people with long histories of cancer/heart disease.
Except, this one year, in one medical school (not mine) the students were dissecting the neck, and found the person’s false teeth wedged in their throat. The coroner was informed and an inquest held. The cause of death was choking on the false teeth, a misadventure, but as the person was living in a high-dependency nursing home, the family had grounds to sue for negligence and inadequate care.
Sad as it may seem, if cases of elderly people dying unexpectedly weren’t investigated, you’d ignore an awful lot of murders, neglect and societal problems.
“Hospital flunkies” have no business looking at anyone, BTW. If someone dies in a hospital, they’ll almost certainly be autopsied, and only doctors qualified for longer than 2 years may sign a death certificate if they die elsewhere.
If we don’t know how people die, it’s also much less likley that we’ll be able to make the medical, legal and societal changes necessary to stop it happening in the future.
You may want to take a look at the dea sometimes. You’d be real surprised, I expect; often, elderly folks who don’t seem to ill, or whose ailments seemed a long way off rom killing them, just don’t wake up in bed one morning.
Once again, I’m pointing out a practical limit here. I don’t care about any theoretical desire to check them all. I’m saying it doesn’t happen in my experience, in the experience of a number of people I’ve talked to about it, and there are an awful lot of dead people to be checking them all.
From what I have learned from books, newspapers, and personal experience with three family members the MD’s provide a “cause” of death" as there is almost always something that can be specified to “hang your hat on.” This save a lot of time for all concerned.
IMHO “Died of old age” is an easy way, if not the most accurate cause to use in conversations with friends and relatives.
Ban all discussion of death? Why?
Possibly some confusion with “coroner”.
In the UK and Ireland, that’s ALL they do. Investigate causes of death.
It’s the state forensic surgeons and forensic pathologists who do the autopsies for the police.
smiling bandit-the people who “wake up dead” die of massive strokes, heart attacks and brain haemorhages, not “old age”. that’s why you put the appropriate cause of of death as “stroke”, “brain haemorrhage” or “heart attack”.
Actually, they do. My aunt’s best friend, a gent aged over 70, died walking down the street. He just collapsed dead in the street. And then you might like to peruse Snopes’ Died on Stage section.
I had a great-grandmother who, at the age of 92, simply went to bed one night and never woke up. That’s how I want to go.