The Biostatistics of Aging (PDF)

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.