Universal Mortality Law, Life Expectancy and Immortality

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.

Various features of the development of individual living species, including individual humans, are programmed. Is death also programmed, and if yes, how is it implemented and what can be the underlying mechanism providing the inevitability of death? The hypothesis presented in this paper is based on the similarity of the human evolution to the evolution of simple discrete nonlinear fractional (with power-law memory) systems. Caputo fractional/fractional difference logistic ma...

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...

In recent we introduced, developed and established a new concept, model, methodology and principle for studying human longevity in terms of demographic basis. We call the new model the "Weon model", which is a general model modified from the Weibull model with an age-dependent shape parameter to describe human survival and mortality curves. We demonstrate the application of the Weon model to the mortality dynamics and the mathematical limit of longevity (the mortality rate to...

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...

We present, solve and numerically simulate a simple model that describes the consequences of increased longevity on fertility rates, population growth and the distribution of wealth in developed societies. We look at the consequences of the repeated use of life extension techniques and show that they represent a novel commodity whose introduction will profoundly influence key aspects of economy and society in general. In particular, we uncover two phases within our simplified...

We use a combination of extreme value theory, survival analysis and computer-intensive methods to analyze the mortality of Italian and French semi-supercentenarians for whom there are validated records. After accounting for the effects of the sampling frame, there appears to be a constant rate of mortality beyond age 108 years and no difference between countries and cohorts. These findings are consistent with previous work based on the International Database on Longevity and ...

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...

Are there limits to human longevity? We suggest a new demographic model to describe human demographic trajectories. Specifically, the model mathematically defines the limits of longevity. Through the demographic analysis of trends for Sweden (between 1751 and 2002), Switzerland (between 1876 and 2002) and Japan (between 1950 and 1999), which are the longest-lived countries, we would like to demonstrate whether or not there is the ultimate limit to longevity. We analyse the tr...

Aging is a fundamental aspect of living systems that undergo a progressive deterioration of physiological function with age and an increase of vulnerability to disease and death. Living systems, known as complex systems, require complexity in interactions among molecules, cells, organs, and individuals or regulatory mechanisms to perform a variety of activities for survival. On this basis, aging can be understood in terms of a progressive loss of complexity with age; this sug...