ArticlePloS one2021
The life expectancy of older couples and surviving spouses.
Article in PloS one, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 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
3 citing papers in PubMed, 18 citations in OpenAlex.
- Probability of males to outlive females: an international comparison from 1751 to 2020.BMJ open · 2022Article
- Article
- Utilization of elderly health promotion services during COVID 19 in Iran: A cross-sectional study.Journal of education and health promotion · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Individual life expectancies provide information for individuals making retirement decisions and for policy makers. For couples, analogous measures are the expected years both spouses will be alive (joint life expectancy) and the expected years the surviving spouse will be a widow or widower (survivor life expectancy). Using individual life expectancies to calculate summary measures for couples is intuitively appealing but yield misleading results, overstating joint life expectancy and dramatically understating survivor life expectancies. This implies that standard "individual life cycle models" are misleading for couples and that "couple life cycle models" must be substantially more complex. Using the CDC life tables for 2010, we construct joint and survivor life expectancy measures for randomly formed couples. The couples we form are defined by age, race and ethnicity, and education. Due to assortative marriage, inequalities in individual life expectancies are compounded into inequalities in joint and survivor life expectancies. We also calculate life expectancy measures for randomly formed couples for the 1930-2010 decennial years. Trends over time show how the relative rate of decrease in the mortality rates of men and women affect joint and survivor life expectancies. Because our couple life expectancy measures are based on randomly formed couples, they do not capture the effects of differences in spouses' premarital characteristics (apart from sex, age, race and ethnicity, and, in some cases, education) or of correlations in spouses' experiences or behaviors during marriage. However, they provide benchmarks which have been sorely lacking in the public discourse.
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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.