Youve likely heard that drowning is one of the leading causes of death for young children, but you might not know that adults can drown easily as well. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , there are 2,960 fatal unintentional drownings annually in the United States and 8,080 nonfatal drowning incidents, including among many older people.

There are several scenarios that contribute to this statistic. Andrea Zaferes , a partner at Lifeguard Systems and an aquatic death investigator, said 80% of drowning victims are male, and alcohol is a factor in 1 in 4 emergency room cases of drowning incidents. But other causes of adult drowning include medical emergencies, such as seizures in the water, trying to save another drowning child or person, getting caught in currents or overestimating swimming ability.

Heres how to spot adult drowning and how to prevent it in the first place:

Someone drowning might be able to listen to your directions at first.

Though you might picture later stages of drowning as a silent, invisible crisis (and youd be right), there could be a short window of time when a person is trying to communicate distress to others and might even be able to hear your directions and follow them, Zaferes said.

She gave an example of her husband saving a woman who swam out in the ocean to retrieve her childs ball. She went too far and got distressed, but he was able to shout instructions to her.

Shes panicking, but she did swim all the way out there hes shouting at her, Get on your back! Get on your back! All of a sudden she heard him and got on her back, and she started to slow down, Zaferes said.

Drowning looks like silent panic. Check a persons face when theyre in the water.

If you can see someones face, you probably will be able to tell if they are drowning, said Dr. Graham Snyder , an emergency medicine physician at WakeMed in Raleigh, North Carolina, who engineered an anti-drowning collar device .

When people drown, they always look the same their eyes are wide open, their mouth is open, and theyre quiet and bobbing up and down. It looks like theyre goofing off. Its called the instinctive drowning response, he said.

It can also be the result of holding a breath for a game.

This is for those who are holding their breath and swimming two or three lengths of the pool, Snyder said: Ive done it a million times, but one thing I didnt know is that its actually pretty easy to hold your breath until you pass out.

He said this is how even athletes who are swimming as far as they can have been lost to drowning. Trying to hold your breath for a long time is how underwater games can become fatal drownings.

Some people may struggle to get horizontal.

Around 40% of Americans dont know how to swim, and swimming literacy varies across income demographics and also across sex, Snyder said.

Swimming to safety in an emergency involves getting horizontal and starting to progress forward. But those in a panic cannot get to that horizontal position, especially if they are non-swimmers, Zaferes explained.

Even those who have some swimming skills might start to try to survive in a vertical condition. But the more tense you get and the more you take big breaths in, you are going to sink more. If you can relax and hold your breath and get onto your back, most people will float, Zaferes said.