The Biostatistics of Aging: From Gompertzian Mortality to an Index of Aging–Relatedness

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 subtle notion—with consequential biomedical and public health relevance—of what it means for a condition to be related to aging. In this pursuit, the book presents a new quantitative method to examine the relative contributions of genetic and environmental factors to mortality and disease 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.