Cause-Specific Senescence: Classifying Causes of Death According to the Rate of Aging

Carlo G. Camarda, Institut National d'Études Démographiques (INED)
Marketa Pechholdova, University of Economics, Prague (VSE)
France Meslé, Institut National d'Études Démographiques (INED)

With an intention of producing a statistically-based cause-of-death shortlist, we reclassified the causes of death based on their age profile, expressed here in terms of the rate of aging. We are using individual-level mortality data from the Czech Republic for period 1998-2011 and connect them to the HMD exposures. The analysis is limited to males aged 30 and over. The cause-specific mortality curves were smoothed using non-parametric procedures and an optimized cluster analysis was applied to the smoothed data. We ended up with three dissimilar age patterns, which we entitled as “premature”, “Gompertzian”, and “degenerative”. The findings suggest that a similar but refined analysis can produce a meaningful disease grouping with a potential of application in future mortality research.