LONGEVITY AND MORTALITY IN INDUSTRIALIZED SOCIETIES

University Of California Berkeley, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Linked publications & trials

Abstract

DESCRIPTION (Adapted from the Applicant's Abstract): Mortality patterns reflect fundamental characteristics of societies and important historical changes affecting health and disease. It this project, the investigators propose to examine the mortality patterns of various industrialized countries in order to improve understanding of two topics. First, they will describe and attempt to explain the American mortality pattern, characterized by relatively high mortality at younger ages and low mortality at older ages (compared to other industrialized countries). Although observed for both men and women, and for various racial groups in the U.S., the causes of this unusual pattern are poorly understood. They will test competing hypotheses about the origins of the American age pattern of mortality by analyzing international differences, historical changes, and mortality differentials within the U.S. in terms of both total and cause-specific mortality. Second, they will study the mortality decline of industrialized societies, both past and present, focusing on the connection between the age pattern of mortality change and shifts in disease patterns, referred to as "epidemiologic transitions." Using data for several countries, they will determine how the age pattern of mortality decline in recent decades has been affected by mortality trends due to cardiovascular diseases and cancer. They will also test the general hypothesis that historical shifts in the age pattern of mortality decline can be attributed, in each case, to distinct epidemiologic transitions, and they will explore the implications of these shifts for mortality forecasting. These substantive analyses will be aided by their continuing effort to assemble a unique collection of international mortality data (the Berkeley Mortality Database), and by their new efforts to estimate mortality differentials within the U.S. population. The latter component involves both methodological studies, using existing data sets and testing the reliability of current data and methods, and a pilot project to assess the feasibility of estimating historical mortality differentials by linking census and death records.