Interesting paper. I'll have to read it more closely. But it doesn't strike me
that they address *premature* mortality, whatever that is. I can't help but get
a Theseus' Ship vibe. Even if the canalizing risks (welding, sky diving,
cholesterol, dehydration, etc.) are all hammered down, I'd expect the noise to
overwhelm the signal as the focus tightens. Anyway, I'll try to read this over
the next few days. Thanks.
On 1/3/23 12:31, David Eric Smith wrote:
Long a favorite topic of mine.
Let me send you a link; almost-surely not the best, but done with ~1min of
google searching images:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0233384
<https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0233384>
See the 5th figure for actual data, rather than models.
But my understanding is that Gompertz mortality statistics are unbelievably
universal across metazoans. The parameters can be shifted by lots of factors,
but the functional form (which takes only a couple of parameters) is absurdly
more robust than one would expect given all that varies.
Anyway, to the extent that there is Gompertz mortality, there is a natural
associated age for age-associated-death. For people it’s somewhere in the
70-80 range, and I think there can be as much as a 10-year difference across
different world gene pools (Japanese being at the upper end, and maybe some
other group in Central Asia east of the Caucasus; I forget).
A thing I remember being told by a guy who does this kind of work, there seem
to be two modes between development-linked diseases (think, childhood
leukemias), and age-associated diseases. We have made remarkable progress on
many of the former, and very little on many of the latter. Also (and I got
this from researchers at Einstein college in Yeshiva some years ago, or from a
stack of their papers), if one avoids rather specific risk factors, like
welding or smoking for lung cancers, or dioxin exposures for male breast
cancers or the like, the leading predictor for most of the old-age diseases is
just your age. So it has (to me) the look of what Holmse’s Wonderful One-Hoss
Shay would be if redone with Poisson statistics, to become a
minimum-information process. The nail that stuck up got hammered down (extra
resources for any disease that becomes visible to selection) that now all the
nails are at about the same height, and there is some kind of ambivalence
frontier.
My own anecdotal experience suggests that my previous paragraphs can’t possibly
be right, since there clearly are common and rare diseases of the old. But I
didn’t make this stuff up, and got it from some serious literature.
Thanks,
Eric
On Jan 3, 2023, at 1:01 PM, glen <geprope...@gmail.com
<mailto:geprope...@gmail.com>> wrote:
">144 mmol/l with 21% elevated risk of premature mortality". My last test a
week ago showed 144! Whew! I guess I have a normal risk for premature mortality. 8^D
The concept of "premature death" is flat out ridiculous. But our inability to
well-define it raises some interesting questions.
• deprivation (by the dead, by the rest of us) - is the death of Ramanujan at
32 *more* premature than the death of some rando at 32?
• life expectancy seems like yet another instance of people not understanding
statistics
• quality of life - is the death of a 20 year old born into and likely to live
in poverty *as* premature as the death of a 20 year old born with a silver
spoon?
• natural selection - is it premature for a 35 year old who's bred, say, 10
children to die?
· or is it premature for them to die before their children have children? I.e.
is being a grandparent a necessary element of a breeder's life?
• consequentialism - had Hitler dyed at age 35, would that have been premature?
I know this seems like a tangent upon tangents. But it's not. It's nonsense to
relate serum Na to premature mortality because premature mortality is nonsense.
Prevalence of chronic disease seems, to me, a little more well-formed ... but
not by much. Biological age just seems like pseudoscience to me, the flip side
of Vampirism. I'd welcome an education, though.
--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ
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