Related papers: Predictive implications of Gompertz's law
Does the human lifespan have an impenetrable biological upper limit which ultimately will stop further increase in life lengths? This question is important for understanding aging, and for society, and has led to intense controversies.…
A recent study in the 2017 Living to 100 Monograph published by the Society of Actuaries suggests, in contrast to previous research, that the risk of death after 110 increases with age. By fitting a Gompertz model to estimated central death…
Suitable assumptions for the Gompertz mortality law take into account the break in the time development observed recently by Wilmoth et al. They show how a drastic reduction in the birth rate and improved living conditions lead to a drastic…
The Gompertz law of dependence of human mortality rate on age is derived from a simple model of death as a result of the exponentially rare escape of abnormal cells from immunological response.
The analysis of the demographic transition of the past century and a half, using both empirical data and mathematical models, has rendered a wealth of well-established facts, including the dramatic increases in life expectancy. Despite…
The Gompertz law of mortality quantitatively describes the mortality rate of humans and almost all multicellular animals. However, its underlying kinetic mechanism is unclear. The Gompertz law cannot explain the effect of temperature on…
There is sustained and widespread interest in understanding the limit, if any, to the human lifespan. Apart from its intrinsic and biological interest, changes in survival in old age have implications for the sustainability of social…
We use a combination of extreme value theory, survival analysis and computer-intensive methods to analyze the mortality of Italian and French semi-supercentenarians for whom there are validated records. After accounting for the effects of…
It is shown that if the computer model of biological ageing proposed by Stauffer is modified such that the late reproduction is privileged then the Gompertz law of exponential increase of mortality can be retrieved.
Lifespan distributions of populations of quite diverse species such as humans and yeast seem to surprisingly well follow the same empirical Gompertz-Makeham law, which basically predicts an exponential increase of mortality rate with age.…
The accounts of medical trials provide very detailed information about the patients' health conditions. In contrast, only minimal data are usually given about demographic factors. Yet, some of these factors can have a notable impact on the…
Are there limits to human longevity? We suggest a new demographic model to describe human demographic trajectories. Specifically, the model mathematically defines the limits of longevity. Through the demographic analysis of trends for…
Infant deaths and old age deaths are very different. The former are mostly due to severe congenital malformations of one or a small number of specific organs. On the contrary, old age deaths are largely the outcome of a long process of…
Well protected human and laboratory animal populations with abundant resources are evolutionary unprecedented, and their survival far beyond reproductive age may be a byproduct rather than tool of evolution. Physical approach, which takes…
Mortality is an instrument of natural selection. Evolutionary motivated theories imply its irreversibility and life history dependence. This is inconsistent with mortality data for protected populations. Accurate analysis yields mortality…
Well protected human and laboratory animal populations with abundant resources are evolutionary unprecedented. Physical approach, which takes advantage of their extensively quantified mortality, establishes that its dominant fraction yields…
Various features of the development of individual living species, including individual humans, are programmed. Is death also programmed, and if yes, how is it implemented and what can be the underlying mechanism providing the inevitability…
We use life annuity prices to extract information about human longevity using a framework that links the term structure of mortality and interest rates. We invert the model and perform nonlinear least squares to obtain implied longevity…
In this paper, we affirm our earlier findings of evidence for a limit to human lifespan. In particular, we assess the analyses in extreme value theory (EVT) performed by Rootz\'en and Zholud. We find that their criticisms of our work are…
How long people live depends on their health, and how it changes with age. Individual health can be tracked by the accumulation of age-related health deficits. The fraction of age-related deficits is a simple quantitative measure of human…