Pace and Shape of Causes of Death

Marcus Ebeling, University of Rostock and Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research
Marie-Pier Bergeron-Boucher, Max Planck Odense Center
Annette Baudisch, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research

Humans have experienced remarkable mortality changes, paralleled by a shift in leading causes of death. This development resulted in exceptionally high levels of senescence. The question arises: how do specific causes of death shape the human aging pattern? To evaluate the relation between causes of death and the pattern of aging, we present a new method applying the recently developed framework of the ``pace and shape of aging''. This approach disentangles the pace of life from the qualitative, pace-standardized pattern (or shape) of aging. Based on US data from 1959 to 2010, we define three criteria to quantify 1) whether specific causes are more or less senescence related, 2) whether they have an accelerating or decelerating effect on aging, and 3) whether they are more or less alterable. We utilize the "pace-shape-space" as a novel tool to summarize demographic information without need for parametric modeling, visualizing results along only two axes.