After our characterization as a “gloom and doom” organization, I hesitate to post this, but last week the state Department of Public Health released its Massachusetts Death 2007 report, and it’s got some fascinating data in it. (See the press release here, or download the whole thing here.) 

The bottom line is that the death rate hit a record low in Massachusetts in 2007 (704 deaths for every 100,000 people) and that life expectancy hit a record 80.2 years. (See? Positive news!)

For only the second year, cancer was the leading cause of death, having overtaken heart disease — which had been the leading cause since it overtook infectious disease in the late 1920s. See the dramatic change in the Powerpoint slide below. (The big spike in infectious disease deaths in the early part of last century coincided with an influenza epidemic.)

As the slide below shows, most major causes of death are much less frequent in Massachusetts than in the United States as a whole — with the curious exception of nephritis, which refers to kidney-related diseases.

Another chart shows how the most likely way to die changes over the course of a typical lifetime: “injuries” (which includes drug abuse and alcohol poisoning) until you hit 45, cancer for the next four decades, and heart disease if you make it past 85.

There’s plenty more data, including differences in the causes and rates of deaths by gender, race, education, and geography. Fine reading for a lovely spring weekend.