Gompertz law in simple computer model of aging of biological population

The Gompertz law of dependence of human mortality rate on age is derived from a simple model of death as a result of the exponentially rare escape of abnormal cells from immunological response.

We use a simple model for biological ageing to study the mortality of the population, obtaining a good agreement with the Gompertz law. We also simulate the same model on a square lattice, considering different strategies of parental care. The results are in agreement with those obtained earlier with the more complicated Penna model for biological ageing. Finally, we present the sexual version of this simple model.

Since its proposition in 1995, the Heumann-Hotzel model has remained as an obscure model of biological aging. The main arguments used against it were its apparent inability to describe populations with many age intervals and its failure to prevent a population extinction when only deleterious mutations are present. We find that with a simple and minor change in the model these difficulties can be surmounted. Our numerical simulations show a plethora of interesting features: t...

Gompertz's law tells us that for humans above the age of 35 the death rate increases exponentially with a doubling time of about 10 years. Here, we show that the same law continues to hold even for ages over 100. Beyond 106 there is so far no statistical evidence available because the number of survivors is too small even in the largest nations. However assuming that Gompertz's law continues to hold beyond 106, we conclude that the mortality rate becomes equal to 1 at age 120...

Suitable assumptions for the Gompertz mortality law take into account the break in the time development observed recently by Wilmoth et al. They show how a drastic reduction in the birth rate and improved living conditions lead to a drastic increase in the fraction of old people in the population, and how immigration of half a percent of the population per year can mostly stop this increase.

Lifespan distributions of populations of quite diverse species such as humans and yeast seem to surprisingly well follow the same empirical Gompertz-Makeham law, which basically predicts an exponential increase of mortality rate with age. This empirical law can for example be grounded in reliability theory when individuals age through the random failure of a number of redundant essential functional units. However, ageing and subsequent death can also be caused by the accumula...

New models for evolutionary processes of mutation accumulation allow hypotheses about the age-specificity of mutational effects to be translated into predictions of heterogeneous population hazard functions. We apply these models to questions in the biodemography of longevity, including proposed explanations of Gompertz hazards and mortality plateaus, and use them to explore the possibility of melding evolutionary and functional models of aging.

The Gompertz law of mortality quantitatively describes the mortality rate of humans and almost all multicellular animals. However, its underlying kinetic mechanism is unclear. The Gompertz law cannot explain the effect of temperature on lifespan and the mortality plateau at advanced ages. In this study a reaction kinetics model with a time dependent rate coefficient is proposed to describe the survival and senescence processes. A temperature-dependent mortality function was d...

Verhulst logistic curve either grows OR decays, depending on the {\it growth rate} parameter value. A similar situation is found in the Gompertz law about human mortality. However, growth can neither be infinite nor reach a finite steady state at an infinite asymptotic time. Moreover before some decay, some growth must have occurred. For example, some levelling-off could occur at finite time, followed either by some growth again or then by some decay. Numerous examples show t...

The Gompertz model since 1825 has significantly contributed to interpretation of ageing in biological and social sciences. However, in modern research findings, it is clear that the Gompertz model is not successful to describe the whole demographic trajectories. In this letter, a new demographic model is introduced especially to describe human demographic trajectories, for example, for Sweden (2002). The new model is derived from the Weibull model with an age-dependent shape ...