Pace and shape of causes of death

Marcus Ebeling, University of Rostock and Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research
Marie-Pier Bergeron Boucher, Max Planck Odense Center
Annette Baudisch, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research

In the last two centuries, humans have experienced remarkable mortality changes along with a shift from infectious and parasitic diseases towards neoplasms and cardiovascular diseases as major causes of death. As recently shown, this development resulted in exceptional high levels of senescence. The question arises: how do specific causes of death link to and influence the human aging pattern? To evaluate the connection between causes of death and the pattern of aging, we apply the newly developed framework of the "pace and shape of aging". This approach disentangles the pace of life from the qualitative, pace-standardized pattern (or shape) of aging. We define three criteria to quantify whether specific causes of death are more or less senescence related based on French data from 1950 to 1999. We utilize the "pace-shape space" as a novel tool to summarize complex demographic information without need for parametric modeling, visualizing results along only two axes.