ArticlePloS one2015
Quantifying the shape of aging.
Article in PloS one, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
26 citing papers in PubMed.
- Ecological Correlates of Differences in Mean Age at Death Across Nearly Extinct Cohorts: The Role of Dietary Habits.Nutrients · 2026Observational
- Gerontology lost in translation from demography to biology of aging and back.Biogerontology · 2026Review
- Understanding the role of ageing in the thermal responses of life history and fitness inProceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- From a Few Cardiovascular Risk Factors to the Prediction of Age at Death: The Shifting Interests of Cardiovascular Epidemiologists.Journal of cardiovascular development and disease · 2025Article
- Focus on age at death in field epidemiology.Aging clinical and experimental research · 2023Review
- Measuring the shape of mortality across animals and plants: Alternatives toEcology and evolution · 2023Article
- Article
- On the emergence of the correlation between life expectancy and the variance in the age at death.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- Evolutionary Approaches in Aging Research.Cold Spring Harbor perspectives in medicine · 2022Review
- An explanation for negligible senescence in animals.Ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- Pace and shape of senescence in three species of duckweed.Ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- The gap in life expectancy and lifespan inequality between Iran and neighbour countries: the contributions of avoidable causes of death.International journal for equity in health · 2022Article
- On the measurement of healthy lifespan inequality.Population health metrics · 2022Article
- Life span inequality as a function of the moments of the deaths distribution: Connections and insights.PloS one · 2022Article
- Article
- Linking the maximum reported life span to the aging rate in wild birds.Ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- Dynamics of life expectancy and life span equality.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Population type influences the rate of ageing.Heredity · 2019Article
- Global trends in lifespan inequality: 1950-2015.PloS one · 2019Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In Biodemography, aging is typically measured and compared based on aging rates. We argue that this approach may be misleading, because it confounds the time aspect with the mere change aspect of aging. To disentangle these aspects, here we utilize a time-standardized framework and, instead of aging rates, suggest the shape of aging as a novel and valuable alternative concept for comparative aging research. The concept of shape captures the direction and degree of change in the force of mortality over age, which—on a demographic level—reflects aging. We 1) provide a list of shape properties that are desirable from a theoretical perspective, 2) suggest several demographically meaningful and non-parametric candidate measures to quantify shape, and 3) evaluate performance of these measures based on the list of properties as well as based on an illustrative analysis of a simple dataset. The shape measures suggested here aim to provide a general means to classify aging patterns independent of any particular mortality model and independent of any species-specific time-scale. Thereby they support systematic comparative aging research across different species or between populations of the same species under different conditions and constitute an extension of the toolbox available to comparative research in Biodemography.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.