Minnesota Deaths Involving Diseases of the Prostate are Elevated in 2022

Why are there more people dying with non-cancer prostate conditions than normal??

Background:

Underlying Cause of Death (UCoD for short) - this refers to the cause of death that is "the disease or injury which initiated the train of events leading directly to death, or the circumstances of the accident or violence which produced the fatal injury"

Multiple Cause of Death (MCoD for short) - this refers to a cause of death that “includes the immediate cause of death and all other intermediate and contributory conditions listed on the death certificate” (basically all the other CoD’s that aren’t the UCoD)

ICD 10 Codes (ICD’s for short) - ICD stands for International Classification of Diseases. It is a system of alphanumeric codes for all the known medical conditions, used for billing for medical procedures/services and for keeping epidemiological data. The CDC assigns ICD codes for every condition/injury documented as a CoD on all death certificates in the US.

There are three ICD 10 Code categories explicitly for prostate diseases:

The following chart shows the total number of deaths where a prostate condition (which we’re going to refer to simply as “prostate deaths” hereon) is listed on the death certificate:

(Note: for all charts, the number on top of each bar/column = the number of deaths for that year; 2015-2019 = shades of grey; 2020 = light blue; 2021 = yellow; 2022 = bright red; 2023 = purple (most charts don’t have 2023 though)

All three pandemic years are above the projected trendline, but whereas 2020/2021 are fairly close, 2022 is way above anything remotely plausible to attribute to random chance. The following chart shows the projected trend # of prostate deaths (left column in each pair) for all three pandemic years side-by-side with the actual # of prostate deaths (right column in each pair):

Yup, something’s up.

UCoD vs MCoD:

Prostate conditions are overwhelmingly MCoD’s - meaning that they are either comorbid conditions in people who died for other reasons, or were themselves caused by the UCoD. In other words, they are mostly “died with” as opposed to “died because of”. (“Died with” here doesn’t mean it contribute at all to the death, just that it wasn’t the main thing that killed the person.)

However, there is still a noticeable bump for 2022 in UCoD prostate deaths:

A noticeable bump such as the one above may not be meaningful however - if we looked at 2015 - 2020, the 20 prostate deaths in 2018 would be a 33% bump over the next highest total, without any of the pandemic era novelties.

Age breakdown

Unsurprisingly, almost all of these deaths are in the seniors. Here are the prostate deaths broken down by age cohort:

With the exception of the 85-89 cohort which had a fluky year in 2019, the excesses of the pandemic years - especially 2022 - are pretty apparent.

Also, notice how for some of the age cohorts, the increase in 2022 is almost double, or even more than double, the pre-pandemic average - so we’ll show these cohorts individually:

Another indication that 2022 is such an outlier is that the % of all deaths that are a prostate death jumps dramatically in 2022. The following chart shows the % of all senior male deaths that were a prostate death - 2022 is miles above the rest:

This chart shows the above statistic - the % of all deaths that were a prostate death - for different age cohorts of seniors, again highlighting the anomalous nature of 2022:

When we break down the prostate deaths by yearly quartile, we see a similar picture - 2022 is dominating across the board, and 2020/2021 have noticeable excess as well. We can also see that 2023 is off to a bad start, with more prostate deaths than all previous years except for 2022:

There is even clear excess in both the military & civilian populations (for most conditions, there is little if any excess in the population identified as having been in the armed forces on the death certificate):

**I don’t think that the increase can simply be explained as “more people are dying, so inevitably a few of them will have a prostate condition”. If that were the case, then we should see greater excess prostate deaths in 2020 & 2021, where there were more deaths than there were in 2022. Rather, this looks like there are more people with prostate conditions in 2022 than there were in previous years, and some of these excess people with prostate disease conditions are dying.**

One anomaly worth pointing out is that there is a bizarre surge in prostate deaths in May of 2020 (green arrow):

If we zoom in to look at where these May 2020 deaths occurred, this is a nursing home / LTC phenomenon- the chart below shows only deaths that occurred in May of each year, broken down by place of death:

Make of that what you will.

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We must point out that in absolute terms, there are very few prostate deaths, meaning that it is difficult to draw any reliable conclusions from these data in a vacuum. However, the increase in 2022 is stark and surely merits a proper investigation (however unlikely it is to ever materialize because it may implicate a certain golden calf Pharma product). Also, we’re not operating in a vacuum - there is plenty of other data that exists surrounding excess mortality in the pandemic years.

There is a silver lining here though: at least there aren’t any female deaths involving prostate disease, something that cannot be taken for granted anymore:

P.S. - Hopefully coming later this week - there is an ongoing EXPLOSION of renal failure deaths (John Beaudoin -

Coquin de Chien’s Newsletter

- posted an epic twitter thread on this but was suspended from twitter shortly thereafter):