The four leading causes of death are cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease, cancer, dementia and neurodegenerative diseases, and metabolic diseases.

“in middle age cancer is still the biggest killer and of course overall cardiovascular disease is and in old age cardiovascular disease and neurodegenerative disease dominate”

“there's something about cancer that's particularly damning which is when you look at the other two chronic diseases that are huge killers which are cardiovascular disease and neurodegenerative disease they increase in their severity uh exponentially as you age and they don't really become a dominant source of mortality until people are in the seventh and eth decade of life and that's not true for cancer”

“so statistically speaking all of us in this room are going to succumb to one of four um processes or disease processes so in rank order the first of those would be cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease that's the leading cause of death in the United States that's the leading cause of death globally it's the leading cause of death for men and it's the leading cause of death for women full stop so that's a heart attack a stroke the number two and it's not that far behind in the United States is cancer and of course cancer isn't just one disease we lump it all together but of course prostate cancer and breast cancer are you know frankly as as as different as you know a pickup truck and a Corolla they're you know they they both have four wheels but that's about where the similarity ends number three would be the diseases of dementia and the neurodeenerative diseases and there's a lot of things in here right so you have Alzheimer's disease which is the most common form of dementia but you also have lots of other types of dementia that are that are not neurodeenerative such as vascular dementia and then you have the fourth horsemen is kind of a spectrum of diseases that we call metabolic diseases”