Atlas reveals how you are likely to die

The geographical pattern of mortality in Great Britain over the past quarter century has been mapped for the first time, revealing how each of us is most likely to die depending on where we live. The Grim Reaper's Road Map: An Atlas of Mortality in Britain shows exactly how people's deaths are affected by where they live, how much money they have, the type of work they do and their lifestyle.

The maps, published today by Policy Press, show patterns that are very different to those created in previous attempts to understand the spread of death across the country. 'Most maps of mortality simply show that more people die in those towns and cities where more people live, particularly in the places where there are lots of elderly people,' said co-author Danny Dorling, professor of human geography at the University of Sheffield. 'But our maps show a person's chances of dying from a particular cause in a particular place, compared to the national average chance for that cause of death, having standardised for distributions of population and by age and sex in each area.'



The maps show deaths from a range of causes, including heart attack, cancer, murder, electrocution and deaths during surgery.

Dorling studied 14,833,696 death records to produce the maps, which show the standardised mortality ratios of every town and city in Britain from 1981 to 2004. The first map in the atlas is of all deaths that have taken place in Britain over the past 24 years. This is then broken down into nine causes, including all cancers and all deaths related to transport. Those maps are then subdivided into 99 categories.

The Grim Reaper's road map: An atlas of mortality in Britain.