Comment on "Inflammatory Exposure and Historical Changes in Human Life-Spans"

The effects of shocks in early life mortality on later life expectancy and mortality compression: A cohort analysis

“…The results in studies that find a very strong association between cohort's mortality early in life and later mortality using aggregate nationallevel mortality data may be confounded by changing period conditions (Barbi and Vaupel 2005;Finch 2006a, 2006b;Finch and Crimmins 2004;Kermack et al 1934Kermack et al , 2001. Studies that remove the potentially confounding period effect using de-trending techniques mostly find a weak or no link between cohort-level early life mortality and later mortality (Gagnon and Mazan 2009;van den Berg et al 2006van den Berg et al , 2009Bruckner and Catalano 2009).…”

“…Existing evidence regarding these links is inconclusive. Finch and Crimmins (2004), Barbi and Vaupel (2005) and Finch (2006a, 2006b) study the link between cohorts' early life and late life mortality, and find that these are strongly and positively correlated. The correlations presented, however, may be spurious since both the dependent and independent variables are subject to trends.…”

Early-life conditions and adult mortality decline in Dutch cohorts born 1812–1921

“…The contribution of improvements in early-life conditions to the overall decline in adult mortality, however, remains a debated issue. Whereas Costa (2004) and Crimmins and Finch (2006) argued that better early-life conditions made a major contribution to the decline in adult mortality, Barbi and Vaupel (2005) argued that period-specific influences were more important during the decline. While they admit that early-life factors may affect late-life mortality, they argue that the effect is modest.…”

Rise, stagnation, and rise of Danish women’s life expectancy

“…A methodological problem arises from the interdeterminacy of linear effects attributable to period (points in time) or cohort (generations), which derives from the perfect correlation among cohort, period and age (age = period − cohort), making only deviations from the combined linearity of cohort and period comparable (1-4). As a result, debates have raged about whether period or cohort effects led to the rapid rise in life expectancy since 1900 in most western countries (1,(5)(6)(7)(8).During the latter half of the 20th century, emphasis was given to temporal effects because most population specialists thought that cohort mortality effects were small and need not be incorporated into models of mortality reductions (1, 9). Since the mid-1990s, however, the increased interest in life course effects on health and mortality has given new life to studies of cohort effects (1).…”