Sweden · 2025 death rates
What if we cured cancer?
Swedes would live about three years longer. Not twenty. Pick any disease below, or slow aging itself, and see why.
| What Swedes die of | Today's rates | With this change | Typical age at death |
|---|
One cure at a time
Years of life expectancy at birth gained if each one disappeared completely, with nothing else changed. Tap a row to try it above.
Why so little?
What could make these numbers wrong
Diseases are treated as separate
Someone saved from cancer is assumed to carry the same risk of everything else as anyone their age. In real life the same old body carries all of them, so a real cure would probably give a little less than shown. That makes the point of this page stronger, not weaker.
A death certificate names one cause
Very old people usually have several illnesses at once, and the doctor writes down the main one. Shifting a death from "heart" to "dementia" changes the colours here, not the total.
The cause data are coarser than the age data
"Slowing aging" is a what-if, not a treatment
It assumes every cause of death slows down together, starting at 30. Nobody can do this to people yet. It shows what would be on the table if someone could.
The far end of the slider is the least certain part
Accidents slow down too
"Everything else" is a big group
It holds diabetes, infections and COVID-19, plus every disease group too small to get its own button: kidneys, gut, Parkinson's and other nerve diseases, and deaths where the cause was unclear. Together they are about a quarter of all deaths, which is why curing "everything else" scores so high.
Life expectancy is a snapshot
"Life expectancy at birth" means: how long a baby would live if this year's death rates never changed. It is a summary of today, not a forecast. Real babies born today will very likely live longer than this.
How it is worked out
Statistics Sweden publishes, for every age from 0 to 110, the chance of dying within the year. The cause-of-death register says what share of the deaths at each age came from each cause. Multiplying the two gives a yearly risk of dying from each cause at each age.
Curing a disease sets its risk to zero and leaves the others untouched. Then the page follows 1,000 imaginary Swedes from birth, year by year, and counts how long they live on average. Demographers call this a cause-deleted life table. Slowing aging instead stretches out the age curve after 30: at 10% slower, an 80-year-old carries today's risks for a 75-year-old.
| Published estimate | Theirs | This page, Sweden |
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