Abstract
The essence of aging is a decline in total vitality with age, being basic personal characteristics of human potential. Viability (\({v}\)) is defined as the probability of surviving through 1 year. Mortality (m) is defined as the probability of dying within the course of the year and, therefore, has an opposite meaning to the term viability but can be an adequate index to estimate the degree of aging of the organism. For the quantitative analysis of aging, a Gompertz–Makeham model (a traditional approach) has been widely used for a long time in describing the phenomenon of exponential increase in mortality rate with age rather well. The other approach to assessing the aging process is to calculate the rate of increment to the mortality rate with age (d(m)), which characterizes the rate of the aging process. The aim of this work is to compare the informativeness, accuracy, and convenience of these approaches to solve the problem of estimating the rate of human aging based on the analysis of age-specific mortality rate in an age group of the human population. It is shown that d(m) is the most accurate, easy to calculate, and mathematically and biologically adequate indicator of the aging rate. This indicator is seen as important to estimate historical changes in the characteristics of the aging of the human population: constancy in the aging rate in history and decline in the aging rate since the middle of the 20th century for middle and older ages as well as the preservation of a reduced aging rate for centenarians.
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Funding
The study was partially supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, project no. 19-29-01046 “Development of the Base of Knowledge, Models, and Methods for Assessing and Monitoring Health and Working Capacity as the Most Important Components of Individual Personal Potential, as well as partially supported by the National Technology Initiative HealthNet, project Health Heuristics Intellectual Digital Platform for Personalized Control of Life Quality.”
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Translated by E. Makeeva
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Dontsov, V.I., Krut’ko, V.N. & Yermakova, N.A. Comparative Analysis of Methods for Estimating the Rate of Population Aging. BIOPHYSICS 67, 1055–1058 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1134/S0006350922060070
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1134/S0006350922060070