ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
Dynamics of life expectancy and life span equality.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 96 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
96 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- A systematic review of historic neighborhood redlining and contemporary health outcomes.Public health · 2025Pooled it
- Trial
- A Comparative Analysis of Aging Across Causes of Death.Evolutionary applications · 2026Article
- Expected lifespan and healthspan among rural and urban individuals in Java, Indonesia.GeroScience · 2026Article
- A Double Decomposition of Standard Deviation Below the Modal Age at Death and the Role of Causes of Death.European journal of population = Revue europeenne de demographie · 2026Article
- Slowdown in mortality improvements and trends in lifespan inequality across high-income countries: the role of changing causes of death, 2010-2021.European journal of public health · 2026Article
- Understanding recent dynamics: prosperity and longevity in Ghana.Health economics review · 2026Article
- Family Members' Experiences of Long-Term Home Care for Older Adults Provided by Live-In Migrant Caregivers: A Meta-Synthesis of Qualitative Studies.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- For reducing premature adult mortality in India, education matters more than income.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Identifying priority diseases and injuries to promote equality as measured by health-adjusted life expectancy: a population-based study.BMJ global health · 2026Article
- The decline of 'Deaths of Despair' in Italy: unveiling this phenomenon in a new context.Population health metrics · 2026Article
- A study of trends and projection of life expectancy and its association with socio-demographic index: Results from GBD study 2023.PloS one · 2026Article
- Changes in life expectancy and life span equality during the COVID-19 epidemic in 2020-22 in Japan.PloS one · 2026Article
- Longer healthy life, but for how many? A stochastic analysis of healthy lifespan inequality.Annals of operations research · 2026Article
- Two universal pathways in demographic transition.Evolutionary human sciences · 2026Article
- A Global Analysis of Within-Country Health Inequalities.JAMA health forum · 2025Article
- Aging dynamics in captive sea turtles reflect conserved life-history patterns across the testudine phylogeny.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Spatial Trends in Mortality Convergence: The Cases of France, Italy, and Spain, 1975-2019.European journal of population = Revue europeenne de demographie · 2025Article
- Compression of morbidity by interventions that steepen the survival curve.Nature communications · 2025Article
- An Overlapping Cohorts Perspective of Lifespan Inequality.Demography · 2025Article
36 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
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Abstract
As people live longer, ages at death are becoming more similar. This dual advance over the last two centuries, a central aim of public health policies, is a major achievement of modern civilization. Some recent exceptions to the joint rise of life expectancy and life span equality, however, make it difficult to determine the underlying causes of this relationship. Here, we develop a unifying framework to study life expectancy and life span equality over time, relying on concepts about the pace and shape of aging. We study the dynamic relationship between life expectancy and life span equality with reliable data from the Human Mortality Database for 49 countries and regions with emphasis on the long time series from Sweden. Our results demonstrate that both changes in life expectancy and life span equality are weighted totals of rates of progress in reducing mortality. This finding holds for three different measures of the variability of life spans. The weights evolve over time and indicate the ages at which reductions in mortality increase life expectancy and life span equality: the more progress at the youngest ages, the tighter the relationship. The link between life expectancy and life span equality is especially strong when life expectancy is less than 70 y. In recent decades, life expectancy and life span equality have occasionally moved in opposite directions due to larger improvements in mortality at older ages or a slowdown in declines in midlife mortality. Saving lives at ages below life expectancy is the key to increasing both life expectancy and life span equality.
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