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Car accidents are the leading cause of death for most age groups

When considering the overall leading causes of death in the United States, you’ll find issues like cancer and heart disease at the top of the list. However, the specific risks that people face vary massively depending on their age. When you sort things into different age groups, the true risks become clear.

For the elderly, for instance, cancer and heart disease are the top killers. These things take time, though. While children can and do get cancer, they do not get it at nearly the same rate as adults. A lot of the time, this is because cancer can take years or decades to form. Mesothelioma from asbestos exposure, for instance, may not show up until 30 or 40 years after that exposure.

So, when you look at the real reasons that people pass away every year, you find that car accidents are the largest cause of accidental death across most age groups. For instance, for everyone from one to 44, the leading cause of death is “unintentional injury.”

When we talk about car accident safety, it’s important to acknowledge this discrepancy in the data. People may look at the deaths from heart disease and the deaths in car accidents and feel like driving is pretty safe since a heart attack or similar complication is more likely to take their life, but that’s only true in the later years of that life. For most of our lives, driving is the most dangerous thing that most of us do on a regular basis.

If you have lost a loved one or gotten injured in a car accident, you may have a right to financial compensation. Insurance companies don’t always play fair, however. Make sure that you speak with an experienced attorney so that you better understand all of your legal options.