Yes. My mom's primary cause of death was pneumonia with secondary being advanced Alzheimer's.

This stat below gives an idea on that difference with diabetes in U.S. And it seems to me, in industrialized nations you're more likely to get treatment so it wouldn't be the primary cause of death.

http://www.diabetes.org/diabetes-basics/statistics/

Deaths: Diabetes remains the 7th leading cause of death in the United States in 2010, with 69,071 death certificates listing it as the underlying cause of death, and a total of 234,051 death certificates listing diabetes as an underlying or contributing cause of death.

Population data is always interesting to me but we can't really draw meaningful conclusions from it - other than perhaps we should be looking at those are the places to recruit subjects for clinical trials.

Every research has it's limitations. The Researchers for the Incidence of Alzheimer's/Dementia in Japan bemoan small sample size. I note that a large proportion of the study was done in Rural areas, that I would think would have better diet, so lower incidence. I did read the whole report, with one eye, and found the Conclusions to be little different from what is already known. What we need is a unified, Worldwide criteria for diagnosing and then collecting and collating Dementia data. With a greatly ageing population this is not going away.

Regarding Causes of Death maps, the one plus point is they are the largest sample size by far - everyone dies of something. How to improve the figures? In the days of Technological Communication, open up everyone's Medical Records for Statistical Analysis upon death. Every incident of the major ailments eventually logged. I would not think to have this done before death, exploitation by Insurance Companies, Employers and Governments would be rife. Yep - Big Brother IS watching!

Dave.

Things like this are already being done (I work in clinical research :)). Lab data is being accessed to pair people with clinical trials (I have mixed feelings about this) - but I can see this really being an asset for orphan (rare) diseases. The biggest challenge is recruitment for any given study.

Additionally, there are people whose sole job is to clinical data mine after a study has been finished and submitted to the FDA. From this we can design better studies, minimize risks, or find a new sample size and/or population for the next clinical trial.