What behaviors and activities are most likely to kill you?

There's a lot of care to be taken in the interpretation of this but very interesting data none-the-less. From Predicting mortality from 57 economic, behavioral, social, and psychological factors by Eli Puterman, Jordan Weiss, Benjamin A. Hives, Alison Gemmill, Deborah Karasek, Wendy Berry Mendes, and David H. Rehkopf.

From the Abstract:

Behavioral and social scientists have identified many nonbiological predictors of mortality. An important limitation of much of this research, however, is that risk factors are not studied in comparison with one another or from across different fields of research. It therefore remains unclear which factors should be prioritized for interventions and policy to reduce mortality risk. In the current investigation, we compare 57 factors within a multidisciplinary framework. These include (i) adverse socioeconomic and psychosocial experiences during childhood and (ii) socioeconomic conditions, (iii) health behaviors, (iv) social connections, (v) psychological characteristics, and (vi) adverse experiences during adulthood. The current prospective cohort investigation with 13,611 adults from 52 to 104 y of age (mean age 69.3 y) from the nationally representative Health and Retirement Study used weighted traditional (i.e., multivariate Cox regressions) and machine-learning (i.e., lasso, random forest analysis) statistical approaches to identify the leading predictors of mortality over 6 y of follow-up time. We demonstrate that, in addition to the well-established behavioral risk factors of smoking, alcohol abuse, and lack of physical activity, economic (e.g., recent financial difficulties, unemployment history), social (e.g., childhood adversity, divorce history), and psychological (e.g., negative affectivity) factors were also among the strongest predictors of mortality among older American adults. The strength of these predictors should be used to guide future transdisciplinary investigations and intervention studies across the fields of epidemiology, psychology, sociology, economics, and medicine to understand how changes in these factors alter individual mortality risk.

Primary predictors of mortality.

Smoking (1)
Alcohol abuse (3)
Lack of physical activity (22)
Financial difficulties (4)
Unemployment (5)
Childhood adversity (16)
Divorce history (2)
Negative affectivity (10)

No surprises here but interesting to see it validated and some metrics put to it.

A graph of the results is especially compelling.

Click to enlarge.

It is interesting to see 6th to 9th most health debilitating factors - history of smoking, lower life satisfaction, and never married. I suspect there is a minefield in here where they are seeking to avoid creating a possible blame-the-victim accusation.

To the extent that the data is replicated and proven true, it does suggest that there are some actions and approaches to improve life which come back to personal choices. Always a dangerous arena.