Insight on "Typical" Longevity: an analysis of the modal lifespan by leading causes of death in Canada

Archive ouverte

Diaconu, Viorela | Ouellette, Nadine | Camarda, Carlo Giovanni | Bourbeau, Robert

Edité par CCSD ; Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research -

International audience. Background: The longevity gains recorded in high-income countries since the 1960s are mainly due to a reduction in mortality from chronic degenerative diseases, which particularly affect older individuals. In recent years the adult modal age at death (M) gained increasing recognition as a lifespan indicator for monitoring improvements in old-age survival. However, studies of M by cause of death are lacking.Objective: This work investigates trends in M by leading causes of death in Canada over the 1974–2011 period and identifies the causes of death that have been more responsive to improvements in lifestyle behaviors and medical progress.Methods: We extend a recent method for estimating the all-cause M using a flexible P-spline approach to the context of cause-of-death analysis. Using data from the Canadian Vital Statistics Database for the 1974‒2011 period, we derive cause-specific modal age-at-death estimates and compare them in terms of levels and time-trends.Results: Although modal age-at-death estimates for heart diseases, cerebrovascular diseases, and the three types of cancers studied (breast/prostate, colorectal, and trachea, bronchus, and lung) differ greatly in terms of levels, they have all followed a steady upward trend since the mid-1970s in Canada. Moreover, the increase in cause-specific modal age estimates occurred at a strikingly similar pace for most causes, except for breast cancer (females) and heart diseases (males), whose modal ages rose at a substantially faster pace.Contribution: Our study introduces an innovative method for estimating cause-specific modal ages at death and provides the first available estimates of time-trends in M by leading causes of death.

Suggestions

Du même auteur

Mortality Modelling at the Oldest Ages in Human Populations. Mortality Modelling at the Oldest Ages in Human Populations: A brief overview

Archive ouverte | Dang, Linh Hoang Khanh | CCSD

Population aging is a widening demographic phenomenon in many developed countries, with the numbers of survivors above age 90 growing at steady rates. It is the source of many challenges to society. Among key factors to understand...

Survival analysis on mortality data at oldest ages: First results on longevity pioneers in France

Archive ouverte | Dang, Linh Hoang Khanh | CCSD

International audience. Studying mortality at extreme old ages has been very challenging, mostly because data of good quality are sparse. Decades of hard work of many research teams offered a new type of data on dea...

The question of the human mortality plateau: Contrasting insights by longevity pioneers

Archive ouverte | Dang, Linh Hoang Khanh | CCSD

International audience. Background: The debate about limits to the human life span is often based on outcomes from mortality at the oldest ages among longevity pioneers. To this day, scholars disagree on the existen...

Chargement des enrichissements...