Please join us for the Applied Statistics Workshop (Gov 3009) this Wednesday, November 16 from 12.00 - 1.30 pm in CGIS Knafel Room 354. Hiram Beltrán-Sánchez, a postdoctoral research fellow at the USC Davis School of Gerontology and at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, will give a talk entitled "New Evidence Linking Early and Late-life Mortality in European Cohorts". As always, a light lunch will be provided.

Early environmental influences on later life health and mortality are well recognized. Using mortality data from 630 cohorts born throughout the 19th and early 20th century in nine European countries, we fitted a multilevel model to further explore the association between early life mortality with both the estimated mortality level at age 40 and the exponential (Gompertz) acceleration in mortality rates with age. Our findings strongly link early life mortality to both the cohort mortality level in mid-adulthood and the Gompertz rate of mortality acceleration during aging. Recent cohorts exposed to lower mortality environments early in life also showed lower mortality levels in adulthood. However, these gains were diminished by faster mortality accelerations at older age. Thus recent increases in adult survival are mainly due to declines in adult mortality levels rather than changes in the rate of aging. This analysis defines new links in the developmental origins of adult health and disease in which effects of early exposure to infections persist to adulthood and remain evident in the cohort rates of mortality at later ages.