Main description:

A practical and clarifying approach to aging and aging-related diseases Providing a thorough and extensive theoretical framework, The Biostatistics of Aging: From Gompertzian Mortality to an Index of Aging-Relatedness addresses the surprisingly subtlenotion with consequential biomedical and public health relevance of what it means for acondition to be related to aging. In this pursuit, the book presents a new quantitative methodto examine the relative contributions of genetic and environmental factors to mortality anddisease incidence in a population.
With input from evolutionary biology, population genetics, demography, and epidemiology, this medically motivated book describes an index of aging-relatedness and also features: * Original results on the asymptotic behavior of the minimum of time-to-event random variables, which extends those of the classical statistical theory of extreme values * A comprehensive and satisfactory explanation based on biological principles of the Gompertz pattern of mortality in human populations * The development of an evolution-based model of causation relevant to mortality and aging-related diseases of complex etiology * An explanation of how and why the description of human mortality by the Gompertz distribution can be improved upon from first principles * The amply illustrated analysis of real-world data, including a program for conducting the analysis written in the freely available R statistical software * Technical appendices including mathematical material as well as an extensive and multidisciplinary bibliography on aging and aging-related diseases The Biostatistics of Aging: From Gompertzian Mortality to an Index of Aging-Relatedness is an excellent resource for practitioners and researchers with an interest in aging and aging-related diseases from the fields of medicine, biology, gerontology, biostatistics, epidemiology, demography, and public health.

Contents:

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENT ix 1 Introduction 1 2 An Account of Gompertzian Mortality through Statistical and Evolutionary Arguments 6 2.1 The Statistical Theory of Extreme Values 10 2.2 The Evolutionary Theory of Aging 36 3 The Argument against Gompertzian Mortality 69 3.1 Departures from the Gompertz Model 70 3.2 An Evolution-Based Model of Causation 72 4 The Index of Aging-Relatedness 93 4.1 A Survival Mixture Model of the Gompertz and Weibull Distributions 94 4.2 Definition and Interpretation of the Index of Aging-Relatedness 97 4.3 The Survival Mixture Model and Competing Risks 103 4.4 Estimation of the Model Parameters 107 4.5 Illustrative Application: The Israeli Ischemic Heart Disease Study 109 4.6 Precision of Estimation 122 5 Discussion: Implications 128 5.1 The Meaning of the Gompertz Parameter 128 5.2 Age as a Risk Factor for Disease 132 5.3 Are Aging-Related Diseases an Integral Part of Aging? 134 5.4 Biological versus Chronological Aging 135 5.5 The Public Health Notion of Compression of Morbidity 138 5.6 A Picture of Aging for the Twenty-First Century 143 APPENDIX A: PROOFS OF RESULTS IN SECTION 2.1.2 WITH SOME EXTENSIONS 154 APPENDIX B: DERIVATION OF HAMILTON S EQUATION FOR THE FORCE OF NATURAL SELECTION ON MORTALITY 170 APPENDIX C: SOME PROPERTIES OF THE GOMPERTZ AND WEIBULL DISTRIBUTIONS 174 APPENDIX D: FIRST AND SECOND PARTIAL DERIVATIVES OF THE MIXTURE LOG-LIKELIHOOD FUNCTION 178 APPENDIX E: EXPECTATION CONDITIONAL MAXIMIZATION (ECM) ALGORITHM 183 APPENDIX F: R PROGRAM 190 REFERENCES 226 AUTHOR INDEX 245 SUBJECT INDEX 253