The purpose of better understanding morbidity and mortality is to understand more about it to help prevent or delay disease and increase quality of life. On a philosophical level, this is part of the existential angst which is so human. I talk about this in my Health Belief Model lecture from last year.
When you are thinking of chronic diseases, there are multiple approaches that can help understand this vast field. While you can use the ideas of prevention and also the epidemiological triad, an additional approach is to examine the top 10 causes of death. For instance, knowing that about 700,000 individuals die from CVD annually, helps to characterize and rank additional disease conditions and understand the relative impact on the general population within the United States.
