A practical and clarifying approach to aging and aging-related diseasesProviding 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 diseasesThe 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.

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENT ix1 Introduction 12 An Account of Gompertzian Mortality through Statistical and Evolutionary Arguments 62.1 The Statistical Theory of Extreme Values 102.2 The Evolutionary Theory of Aging 363 The Argument against Gompertzian Mortality 693.1 Departures from the Gompertz Model 703.2 An Evolution-Based Model of Causation 724 The Index of Aging-Relatedness 934.1 A Survival Mixture Model of the Gompertz and Weibull Distributions 944.2 Definition and Interpretation of the Index of Aging-Relatedness 974.3 The Survival Mixture Model and Competing Risks 1034.4 Estimation of the Model Parameters 1074.5 Illustrative Application: The Israeli Ischemic Heart Disease Study 1094.6 Precision of Estimation 1225 Discussion: Implications 1285.1 The Meaning of the Gompertz Parameter 1285.2 Age as a Risk Factor for Disease 1325.3 Are Aging-Related Diseases an Integral Part of Aging? 1345.4 Biological versus Chronological Aging 1355.5 The Public Health Notion of Compression of Morbidity 1385.6 A Picture of Aging for the Twenty-First Century 143APPENDIX A: PROOFS OF RESULTS IN SECTION 2.1.2 WITH SOME EXTENSIONS 154APPENDIX B: DERIVATION OF HAMILTON'S EQUATION FOR THE FORCE OF NATURAL SELECTION ON MORTALITY 170APPENDIX C: SOME PROPERTIES OF THE GOMPERTZ AND WEIBULL DISTRIBUTIONS 174APPENDIX D: FIRST AND SECOND PARTIAL DERIVATIVES OF THE MIXTURE LOG-LIKELIHOOD FUNCTION 178APPENDIX E: EXPECTATION-CONDITIONAL MAXIMIZATION (ECM) ALGORITHM 183APPENDIX F: R PROGRAM 190REFERENCES 226AUTHOR INDEX 245SUBJECT INDEX 253