Affiliation:
1. The author is in the Department of Biological Sciences at Stanford University, Stanford CA 94305, USA..
Abstract
Americans are getting fatter, and it is known that increased obesity may increase the risk of death. Olshansky
et al.
have argued that this increase in obesity will likely slow, or even reverse, increases in life expectancy in the United States and perhaps save U.S. Social Security as a result. We discuss historical changes in the mortality rate and the reasons why other analyses argue that life expectancies will continue to increase. We also discuss the limitations of using single risk factors such as obesity as predictors of mortality risk. Finally, we explore the relation between risk factors and the long-term historical increase in human life expectancy.
Publisher
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Reference19 articles.
1. Period life expectancy is computed from age-specific mortality rates experienced in a particular year (19).
2. Data for Sweden and the United States are from the Human Mortality Database [University of California Berkeley (USA) and Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (Germany)]. Data were downloaded on various dates in March 2005.
3. S. J. Olshansky, D. J. Passaro, R. C. Hershow, J. Layden, B. A. Carnes, J. Brody, L. Hayflick, R. N. Butler, D. B. Allison, D. S. Ludwig, A potential decline in life expectancy in the United States in the 21st century. N. Engl. J. Med. 352, 1138-1145 (2005).
4. R. Lee, T. Miller, Evaluating the performance of the Lee-Carter approach to modeling and forecasting mortality. Demography 38, 537-549 (2001).
5. S. Tuljapurkar, N. Li, C. Boe, A universal pattern of mortality decline in the G7 countries. Nature 405, 789-792 (2000).
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