system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
How can a person's risk of death "from any cause" be determined?

You hear statistics that state something like "getting less than X hours of sleep per night increases one's risk of death by any cause by Y percent."

How can one's risk of death "by any cause" be determined? If I sleep less than X hours per night, then by that logic is my risk of being struck by a meteorite or trampled by elephants higher? I know those are both outlandish, extreme, and absurd examples to use, but would they not fall under the category of "any cause?" Or does it just mean organic, health-related causes? "Death by any cause" just seems like a very ambiguous and unspecific choice of words.
gpt
Check that a person is alive; check later to see if they're dead. If they're dead, they have died "by any cause". Repeat for a large number of people.

Divide up all the people into ones with X and ones with not X. If one group has a higher death rate at some level of significance, publish.

Establishing causal connections is beyond the scope of the paper.