Specific Risk Factors can Appear to Decline in Importance in Later Life, as the High-Risk Individuals are Already Dead

As this 40-year longitudinal study illustrates, when measuring the correlation between specific risk factors on specific forms of mortality, their influence can appear to decline in later life. That is to say that mortality rates keep rising with advancing age, but they are less obviously influenced by any one cause for a given cohort of individuals. This effect occurs because the fatal consequences of a particular form of age-related dysfunction will tend to occur earlier in old age for individuals with the highest risk. With each passing year, a given age group is ever more made up of resilient survivors, people who - for whatever reason - do not have an overall mortality risk that is strongly determined by the specific dysfunction examined in the study. If they did, they would be dead already. The age range over which this effect occurs is different depending on the risk factor in question and how it is linked to forms of harm. The cardiovascular risk factors examined here are more important or less important in a quite different set of ages in later life than, say, the advanced transthyretin amyloidosis that seems to be a majority cause of death for supercentenarians. The end of life is a set of overlapping curves of risk and influence for many different mechanisms, rising and falling out of lockstep due to the continued loss of those individuals most at risk, even as overall mortality rate rises inexorably. Despite efforts during recent years to identify ...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs