Related papers: Exploration of the strength of family links

The Farr-Bertillon law states that the mortality rate of single and widowed persons is about three times the rate of married people of same age. This excess mortality can be measured with good accuracy for all ages except for young…

Family history is usually seen as a significant factor insurance companies look at when applying for a life insurance policy. Where it is used, family history of cardiovascular diseases, death by cancer, or family history of high blood…

The Farr-Bertillon law says that for all age-groups the death rate of married people is lower than the death rate of people who are not married (i.e. single, widowed or divorced). Although this law has been known for over 150 years, it has…

Biologists have found that the death rate of cells in culture depends upon their spatial density. Permanent "Stay alive" signals from their neighbours seem to prevent them from dying. In a previous paper (Wang et al. 2013) we gave evidence…

Certain currents in sociology consider society as being composed of autonomous individuals with independent psychologies. Others, however, deem our actions as strongly influenced by the accepted standards of social behavior. The later view…

Background: Neighbourhood social fragmentation and socioeconomic deprivation seem to be associated with suicide mortality. However, results are inconclusive, which might be because dynamics in the social context are not well-represented by…

We show that a large scale mass mortality results in increased numbers of suicides. As a case in point, we consider the influenza epidemic of October 1918 in the United States. In this month, suicides peaked at a level of over 4s (where s…

The paper explores the connection between short-range social ties (i.e. links with close relatives) and the occurrence of suicide. The objective is to discriminate between a model based on social ties and a model based on psychological…

The existence of an upper limit to the human lifespan has been widely debated, with studies offering both supporting and opposing evidence. Using unique individual-level death and population records for individuals aged 90 and older in…

Understanding how people interact and socialize is important in many contexts from disease control to urban planning. Datasets that capture this specific aspect of human life have increased in size and availability over the last few years.…

Background: A wide range of diseases show some degree of clustering in families; family history is therefore an important aspect for clinicians when making risk predictions. Familial aggregation is often quantified in terms of a familial…

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…

Occasional social assistance prevents individuals from a range of social ills, particularly unemployment and poverty. It remains unclear, however, how and to what extent continued reliance on social assistance leads to individuals becoming…

Adverse conditions in early life can have consequential impacts on individuals' health in older age. In one of the first papers on this topic, Barker and Osmond 1986 show a strong positive relationship between infant mortality rates in the…

Disparity in suicide rates between urban and suburban/rural areas is growing, with rural areas typically witnessing higher suicide rates in the U.S. However, previous studies often ignored the effect of socio-environmental factors on the…

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…

Aggregated health data such as claims data from health insurances become more and more available for research purposes. Estimates of excess mortality from prevalence and incidence of a chronic condition have only been possible for ages 50…

In the wake of the influenza pandemic of 1889-1890 Jacques Bertillon, a pioneer of medical statistics, noticed that after the massive death spike there was a dip in birth numbers around 9 months later which was significantly larger than…

The majority of common diseases are influenced by multiple genetic and environmental factors such as Cancer. Even though uncovering the main causes of disease is deemed difficult due to the complexity of gene-gene and gene-environment…

Comorbidity networks, which capture disease-disease co-occurrence usually based on electronic health records, reveal structured patterns in how diseases cluster and progress across individuals. However, how these networks evolve across…