Cancer was ranked the leading cause of death in Taipei for the 44th straight year last year, while seven of 10 leading causes of death were chronic diseases, data from the Taipei City Government’s Department of Health showed.
A total of 17,160 deaths were reported in Taipei last year, an increase of 207 people, or 1.2 percent, from the previous year, while the average age at death was 75.3 — higher than the national average of 72 years old.
The top 10 leading causes of death in the city accounted for 76 percent of deaths last year.
Cancer accounted for 29.3 percent of all deaths in the city, followed by heart disease (13.9 percent), cerebrovascular disease (6.7 percent), pneumonia (6.6 percent), diabetes (4.5 percent), lower respiratory diseases (3.7 percent), nephritis, nephrotic syndrome and kidney disease (3.3 percent), hypertensive diseases (2.7 percent), septicemia (2.7 percent) and accidental injuries (2.5 percent).
The ranking was similar to the previous year, with only septicemia and accidental injuries switching places, data showed.
On average, a Taipei resident died of cancer every 105 minutes last year, the department’s Statistics Office Director Huang Li-chun (黃麗君) said, adding that cancer has been the top of cause of death nationwide for the past 34 years.
The top five deadliest cancer types were lung cancer, colorectal cancer, liver cancer, breast cancer and prostate cancer, Huang said.
She urged people to maintain a healthy lifestyle, including “regular health examinations, a balanced diet, regular exercise and weight control, while avoiding smoking cigarettes and chewing betel nuts,” to prevent cancer.
The top two leading causes of death for both men and women were cancer and heart disease, the data showed.
Pneumonia was the third leading cause of death in men, while cerebrovascular disease held the same ranking for women, it showed.
Vascular dementia entered the top 10 list for the first time, becoming the 10th leading cause of death in women.
Lee Yi-han (李易翰), a physician of General Medicine at Taipei City Hospital, said the reason vascular dementia became a top 10 cause of death in women needs to be studied, but it might be associated with women living longer than men and dementia triggered by chronic diseases that hinder blood circulation.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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