The Biostatistics of Aging (ePub)

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.