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Complexity of the relationship between life expectancy and overlap of lifespans.

ABSTRACT: Longevity has long been recognised as a key facilitator of reciprocal altruism because repeated cooperation of partners hinges on mutual survival. Although demographic tools can be used to quantify mutual survival and expected overlapping lifespans, studies on the evolutionary theory of cooperation take only limited advantage of demography. Overlap of lifespans depends on variation in survival across ages and can be high or low independently of high or low life expectancies. Here we develop formal demographic measures to study the complex relationships between shared life expectancy of two birth cohort peers, the proportion of their lives that they can expect to overlap, and longevity. We simulate age-specific mortality schedules using a Siler model to reveal how infant and senescent mortality, along with age-independent mortality, affect the relationship between the proportion of life shared and life expectancy. We find that while the proportion of life shared can vary vastly for similar life expectancies, almost all changes to mortality schedules that result in higher life expectancies also result in higher proportions of life shared. A distinct exception occurs if life expectancy increases due to lowering the rate of senescence. In this case the proportion of life shared decreases. Our work shows that almost all selective pressures that result in higher life expectancies also result in a larger proportion of life shared. Therefore, selective forces that extend life also improve the chances that a cooperative system would be stable in terms of reciprocal interactions. Since reciprocal interactions may also reduce mortality and result in a feedback loop with the evolution of longevity, our measures and findings can be used for future cross-species comparisons that aim to disentangle predecessor and successor in the evolution of longevity and cooperation.

SUBMITTER: Barthold Jones JA

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6042694 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Complexity of the relationship between life expectancy and overlap of lifespans.

Barthold Jones Julia A JA Lenart Adam A Baudisch Annette A

PloS one 20180712 7

Longevity has long been recognised as a key facilitator of reciprocal altruism because repeated cooperation of partners hinges on mutual survival. Although demographic tools can be used to quantify mutual survival and expected overlapping lifespans, studies on the evolutionary theory of cooperation take only limited advantage of demography. Overlap of lifespans depends on variation in survival across ages and can be high or low independently of high or low life expectancies. Here we develop form ...[more]

PMID: 30001385

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Project description:BACKGROUND : Life expectancy at birth (LEB), one of the main indicators of human longevity, has often been used to characterise the health status of a population. Understanding its relationships with the deprivation is key to develop policies and evaluate interventions that are aimed at reducing health inequalities. However, methodological challenges in the analysis of LEB data arise from the fact that different Government agencies often provide spatially aggregated information on LEB and the index of multiple deprivation (IMD) at different spatial scales. Our objective is to develop a geostatistical framework that, unlike existing methods of inference, allows to carry out spatially continuous prediction while dealing with spatial misalignment of the areal-level data. METHODS : We developed a model-based geostatistical approach for the joint analysis of LEB and IMD, when these are available over different partitions of the study region. We model the spatial correlation in LEB and IMD across the areal units using inter-point distances based on a regular grid covering the whole of the study area. The advantages and strengths of the new methodology are illustrated through an analysis of LEB and IMD data from the Liverpool district council. RESULTS : We found that the effect of IMD on LEB is stronger in males than in females, explaining about 63.35% of the spatial variation in LEB in the former group and 38.92% in the latter. We also estimate that LEB is about 8.5 years lower between the most and least deprived area of Liverpool for men, and 7.1 years for women. Finally, we find that LEB, both in males and females, is at least 80% likely to be above the England wide average only in some areas falling in the electoral wards of Childwall, Woolton and Church. CONCLUSION : The novel model-based geostatistical framework provides a feasible solution to the spatial misalignment problem. More importantly, the proposed methodology has the following advantages over existing methods used model LEB: (1) it can deliver spatially continuous inferences using spatially aggregated data; (2) it can be applied to any form of misalignment with information provided at a range of spatial scales, from areal-level to pixel-level.

Dataset Information

Complexity of the relationship between life expectancy and overlap of lifespans.

Publications

Complexity of the relationship between life expectancy and overlap of lifespans.

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