Levy / Levin The Biostatistics of Aging

From Gompertzian Mortality to an Index of Aging-Relatedness
1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-118-64567-3
Verlag: John Wiley & Sons
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 272 Seiten, E-Book

A practical and clarifying approach to aging andaging-related diseases
Providing a thorough and extensive theoretical framework, TheBiostatistics of Aging: From Gompertzian Mortality to an Index ofAging-Relatedness addresses the surprisinglysubtlenotion--with consequential biomedical and public healthrelevance--of what it means for acondition to be related toaging. In this pursuit, the book presents a new quantitativemethodto examine the relative contributions of genetic andenvironmental factors to mortality anddisease incidence in apopulation.
With input from evolutionary biology, population genetics,demography, and epidemiology, this medically motivated bookdescribes an index of aging-relatedness and also features:
* Original results on the asymptotic behavior of the minimum oftime-to-event random variables, which extends those of theclassical statistical theory of extreme values
* A comprehensive and satisfactory explanation based onbiological principles of the Gompertz pattern of mortality in humanpopulations
* The development of an evolution-based model of causationrelevant to mortality and aging-related diseases of complexetiology
* An explanation of how and why the description of humanmortality by the Gompertz distribution can be improved upon fromfirst principles
* The amply illustrated analysis of real-world data, including aprogram for conducting the analysis written in the freely availableR statistical software
* Technical appendices including mathematical material as well asan extensive and multidisciplinary bibliography on aging andaging-related diseases
The Biostatistics of Aging: From Gompertzian Mortality to anIndex of Aging-Relatedness is an excellent resource forpractitioners and researchers with an interest in aging andaging-related diseases from the fields of medicine, biology,gerontology, biostatistics, epidemiology, demography, and publichealth.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Levy, Gilberto

Levin, Bruce

Inhaltsverzeichnis

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENT ix
1 Introduction 1
2 An Account of Gompertzian Mortality through Statistical andEvolutionary 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 WeibullDistributions 94
4.2 Definition and Interpretation of the Index ofAging-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 DiseaseStudy 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 SOMEEXTENSIONS 154
APPENDIX B: DERIVATION OF HAMILTON'S EQUATION FOR THEFORCE OF NATURAL SELECTION ON MORTALITY 170
APPENDIX C: SOME PROPERTIES OF THE GOMPERTZ AND WEIBULLDISTRIBUTIONS 174
APPENDIX D: FIRST AND SECOND PARTIAL DERIVATIVES OF THEMIXTURE 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

Über Autor(innen)

GILBERTO LEVY, MD, DRPH, is a neurologistwith a primary research interest in aging and aging-relateddiseases, particularly dementia. He conducted clinical researchwithin the spheres of epidemiological studies and clinical trialsat Columbia University for more than ten years. Dr. Levy is theauthor of over thirty journal articles and three book chapters.
BRUCE LEVIN, PHD, is Professor ofBiostatistics and past chair of the Department of Biostatistics inthe Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. AFellow of the American Statistical Association, his researchinterests include sequential selection procedures and their use inadaptive clinical trial designs. He is the coauthor (with J.L.Fleiss and M.C. Paik) of Statistical Methods for Rates andProportions, Third Edition, published by Wiley.