Title:	Biodemography of Aging
Authors:	Anatoliy I. Yashin Eric Stallard Kenneth C. Land Igor Akushevich Liubov S. Arbeeva Konstantin G. Arbeev Irina Culminskaya Mikhail Kovtun Julia Kravchenko Alexander M. Kulminski Frank A. Sloan Svetlana V. Ukraintseva Deqing Wu
Keywords:	Biodemography
Issue Date:	2016
Publisher:	Springer
Description:	Some people live to age 100 years or more, others become sick and die prematurely. What factors determine human lifespan? Which biological mechanisms are involved in the regulation of health span and longevity? Which forces shape the age pattern and affect the time trend of human mortality? These questions constitute an emerging high priority research area because of the ever-increasing proportions of elderly individuals in most countries and the imperative to improve the health of these populations. Such improvements will require substantially better understand- ing of the regularities of individual aging-related changes in biological variables (biomarkers) that take place during the life course and their connections with aging- related declines in health and survival. Better understanding can be reached by proper integration of relevant informa- tion accumulated in the field with newly collected data. The data for such studies are readily available today. Many informative datasets have been collected in longitudinal studies of aging, health, and longevity. The dimensions and scope of such information will continually increase over time—resulting in a supermassive “Big Data” problem. Dealing with such data requires efficient approaches that allow the analysis not only of subsets of available data (which practically all traditional methods do) but also the analysis of the entire dataset within the scope of a single comprehensive framework. The goal of this monograph is to show how questions about the connections between and among aging, health, and longevity can be addressed using the wealth of available accumulated knowledge in the field, the large volumes of genetic and non-genetic data collected in longitudinal studies, and advanced biodemographic models and analytic methods. The distinguishing features of the aging-related declines in health and survival are the development of comorbidity and multimorbidity involving chronic diseases, medical conditions, frailties, and physical and cognitive impairments that are mutually dependent. The dynamic connections among trajectories of aging changes in biomarkers, risks of diseases, and mortality risks are important for evaluating long-term consequences of exposures to environmental factors, medical interven- tions, and other disturbances. This monograph visualizes aging-related changes in physiological variables and survival probabilities, describes methods, and summa- rizes the results of analyses of longitudinal data on aging, health, and longevity in humans performed by the group of researchers in the Biodemography of Aging Research Unit (BARU) at Duke University during the past decade.
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/54091
ISBN:	978-94-017-7587-8
Appears in Collections:	Population Studies

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