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One of the confounding aspects of epidemiology is how co-morbidity, or the existence of two diseases at the same time, can produce a “what came first, the chicken or the egg?” effect. While someone who dies of heart disease will be recorded as a heart disease death, that final factor may have been caused by diabetes. Which means, diabetes would be responsible for the death, but would not be assigned as the cause. If all of those deaths were taken into account, then diabetes would jump from the 7th leading cause of death to the 3rd. Read more on the Washington Post:
