Related papers: Child mortality in Penna ageing model

An SEIRS epidemic with disease fatalities is introduced in a growing population (modelled as a super-critical linear birth and death process). The study of the initial phase of the epidemic is stochastic, while the analysis of the major…

The effects of inbreeding on human health depend critically on the number and severity of recessive, deleterious mutations carried by individuals. In humans, existing estimates of these quantities are based on comparisons between…

Widespread population aging has made it critical to understand death rates at old ages. However, studying mortality at old ages is challenging because the data are sparse: numbers of survivors and deaths get smaller and smaller with age. We…

We consider a population of N individuals, whose dynamics through time is represented by a biparental Moran model with two types: an advantaged type and a disadvantaged type. The advantage is due to a mutation, transmitted in a Mendelian…

At the physiological level, aging is neither rigid nor unchangeable. Instead, the molecular and mechanisms driving aging are sufficiently plastic that a variety of diverse interventions--dietary, pharmaceutical, and genetic--have been…

Mutations can arise from the chance misincorporation of nucleotides during DNA replication or from DNA lesions that are not repaired correctly. We introduce a model that relates the source of mutations to their accumulation with cell…

In this paper we investigate the flexibility of matrix distributions for the modeling of mortality. Starting from a simple Gompertz law, we show how the introduction of matrix-valued parameters via inhomogeneous phase-type distributions can…

The last two centuries have seen a significant increase in life expectancy. Although past trends suggest that mortality will continue to decline in the future, uncertainty and instability about the development is greatly increased due to…

The concept of random deaths in a computational model for population dynamics is critically examined. We claim that it is just an artifact, albeit useful, of computational models to limit the size of the populations and has no biological…

In this paper, we advance the network theory of aging and mortality by developing a causal mathematical model for the mortality rate. First, we show that in large networks, where health deficits accumulate at nodes representing health…

Suppose, contrary to fact, in 1950, we had put the cohort of 18 year old non-smoking American men on a stringent mandatory diet that guaranteed that no one would ever weigh more than their baseline weight established at age 18. How would…

This paper analyzes mortality cohort effect of birth year and develops an approach to identify and measure cohort effects in mortality data set. The approach is based on differential geometry and leads to an explicit result which can…

Reliable mortality estimates at the subnational level are essential in the study of health inequalities within a country. One of the difficulties in producing such estimates is the presence of small populations, where the stochastic…

We study the effects of non-systematic and systematic mortality risks on the required initial capital in a pension plan, in the presence of financial risks. We discover that for a pension plan with few members the impact of pooling on the…

The prevalence of dementia is set to explode throughout the 21st century. This trend has already started in developed countries and will continue to place heavy pressures on both public health and social care services across the world. No…

We have used the Penna ageing model to analyze how the differences in evolution of sex chromosomes depend on the strategy of reproduction. In panmictic populations, when females (XX) can freely choose the male partner (XY) for reproduction…

At any moment in time, evolution is faced with a formidable challenge: refining the already highly optimised design of biological species, a feat accomplished through all preceding generations. In such a scenario, the impact of random…

Here we study how mutations which change physical properties of cell proteins (stability) impact population survival and growth. In our model the genotype is presented as a set of N numbers, folding free energies of cells N proteins.…

A large amount of population models use the concept of a carrying capacity. Simulated populations are bounded by invoking finite resources through a survival probability, commonly referred to as the Verhulst factor. The fact, however, that…

After birth setting up an effective immune system is a major challenge for all living organisms. In this paper we show that this process can be explored by using the age-specific infant death rate as a kind of sensor. This is made possible…