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. 2025 Apr 10;38(4):454-459.
doi: 10.1080/08998280.2025.2480979. eCollection 2025.

Causes of death across different locations in the United States, 2015 to 2022

Taha Mansoor  1 , Daniyal Shahid  2 , Kartik Gupta  3 , Dmitry Abramov  4 , Salim S Virani  5 , Abdul Mannan Khan Minhas  6   7
Affiliations

Causes of death across different locations in the United States, 2015 to 2022

Taha Mansoor et al. Proc (Bayl Univ Med Cent). .

Abstract

Objective: The objective of this study was to investigate the leading underlying causes of death across different locations in the USA from 2015 to 2022.

Methods: Data on the leading underlying causes of death in each location of death-including medical outpatient facility or emergency room, medical inpatient facility, medical facility/dead on arrival, decedent's home, hospice facility, and nursing home/long-term care-within the USA in individuals ≥18 years were extracted from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Wide-Ranging Online Data for Epidemiologic Research (CDC WONDER) database.

Results: There were 22,236,700 deaths in our studied locations during the study period. Most deaths were in the decedents' homes (34.5%), followed by inpatient medical facilities (31.8%). Malignant neoplasms were the leading cause of death in hospice facilities (32.8%-40.0%) and decedents' homes (25.9%-31.5%), followed by heart disease. Heart disease was the most common cause of death in nursing homes/long-term care facilities (20.0%-23.6%), outpatient or emergency medical facilities (36.5%-44.7%), those dead on arrival at medical facilities (35.4%-40.3%), and inpatient medical facilities (14.3%-20.4%), with COVID-19 becoming the top cause of death in 2020 and 2021 in inpatient medical facilities.

Conclusion: Overall, heart disease and malignant neoplasm were among the top three causes of death in all studied locations in our study period.

Keywords: Death; location; trends.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors report no funding or conflicts of interest.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Percentage of deaths by location in the USA from 2015 to 2022.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Percentage of deaths in US regions in 2022 by location: (a) Northeast, (b) Midwest, (c) West, and (d) South.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Trends in leading underlying causes of death from 2015 to 2022 in the United States in (a) decedent’s home, (b) hospice facility, (c) nursing home/long-term care, (d) inpatient medical facility, (e) outpatient medical facility or emergency room, and (f) medical facility—dead on arrival.
Figure 4.
Figure 4.
Trends stratified by location in the USA from 2015 to 2022 for different underlying causes of death: (a) diseases of the heart, (b) malignant neoplasm, and (c) COVID-19.
Figure 5.
Figure 5.
Trends in the proportions of death by location in the USA from 2015 to 2022.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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