ArticleDemography2017
The Methuselah Effect: The Pernicious Impact of Unreported Deaths on Old-Age Mortality Estimates.
Article in Demography, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
What it found
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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
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- Geographic Variation in Racial Disparities in Age-Adjusted Mortality Rates in Mississippi.Journal of racial and ethnic health disparities · 2026Article
- Mortality Modeling of Partially Observed Cohorts Using Administrative Death Records.Population research and policy review · 2023Article
- Ethnicity and survival after a dementia diagnosis: a retrospective cohort study using electronic health record data.Alzheimer's research & therapy · 2023Article
- The life expectancy of older couples and surviving spouses.PloS one · 2021Article
- Comparability of Mortality Estimates from Social Surveys and Vital Statistics Data in the United States.Population research and policy review · 2019Article
- Late-life mortality is underestimated because of data errors.PLoS biology · 2019Article
- Review
- Separating the Signal From the Noise: Evidence for Deceleration in Old-Age Death Rates.Demography · 2018Article
- Errors as a primary cause of late-life mortality deceleration and plateaus.PLoS biology · 2018Article
- Expanding the scope of health disparities research in Alzheimer's disease and related dementias: Recommendations from the "Leveraging Existing Data and Analytic Methods for Health Disparities Research Related to Aging and Alzheimer's Disease and Related Dementias" Workshop Series.Alzheimer's & dementia (Amsterdam, Netherlands)Article
- Black and White Differences in Life Expectancy in 4 US States, 1969-2013.Public health reports (Washington, D.C. : 1974)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
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
We examine inferences about old-age mortality that arise when researchers use survey data matched to death records. We show that even small rates of failure to match respondents can lead to substantial bias in the measurement of mortality rates at older ages. This type of measurement error is consequential for three strands in the demographic literature: (1) the deceleration in mortality rates at old ages; (2) the black-white mortality crossover; and (3) the relatively low rate of old-age mortality among Hispanics, often called the "Hispanic paradox." Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Older Men matched to death records in both the U.S. Vital Statistics system and the Social Security Death Index, we demonstrate that even small rates of missing mortality matching plausibly lead to an appearance of mortality deceleration when none exists and can generate a spurious black-white mortality crossover. We confirm these findings using data from the National Health Interview Survey matched to the U.S. Vital Statistics system, a data set known as the "gold standard" (Cowper et al. 2002) for estimating age-specific mortality. Moreover, with these data, we show that the Hispanic paradox is also plausibly explained by a similar undercount.
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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.