The Gompertz mortality law

Assembled from 16 blocks · 2 evidence · 11 related

1. Story
2. Benjamin Gompertz's 1825 observation that, after early adulthood, the human age-specific death rate rises approximately exponentially with age — in modern populations doubling roughly every eight years. It is the closest thing demography has to a law of ageing, and it makes the central question of this Journey testable. Public health interventions have overwhelmingly reduced the constant term, the background hazard that is not age-related: they shift the whole curve down without changing its slope. An intervention that genuinely slowed ageing would reduce the slope — the mortality-rate doubling time would lengthen — and no human intervention has ever been shown to do that. The law is descriptive rather than mechanistic, it fits badly below about age thirty, and it appears to break down at extreme ages, where mortality flattens instead of continuing to double.
3. Knowledge
4. Compression of mortality (rectangularisation of the survival curve)
5. The Gompertz mortality law
6. Connections
7. Compression of mortality (rectangularisation of the survival curve)
8. The late-life mortality plateau
9. Gompertz describes the exponential rise of adult mortality
10. Mortality is reported to plateau after age 105
11. Maximum human lifespan
12. The Gompertz mortality law
13. Fries proposes the compression of morbidity
14. Evidence
15. Supports the claim that adult human mortality rises approximately exponentially with age. V55 verification basis: the paper was NOT retrieved in this session — WebFetch is egress-blocked and no search was available — so the citation rests on the producer's knowledge of the work.
16. Supports the reported flattening of the death hazard after about age 105 in individually validated Italian records. V55 verification basis: not retrieved; the approximate one-half annual hazard figure is recalled.