Compression of mortality (rectangularisation of the survival curve)

Assembled from 18 blocks · 2 evidence · 13 related

1. Story
2. The observed change in the shape of the survival curve as mortality fell: the curve went from a long concave decline, with deaths spread across every age, to something closer to a rectangle, with most of a cohort surviving into the seventies and eighties and then dying within a comparatively narrow band. Two distinct claims are often confused under the name. The demographic claim — that the variance of age at death has fallen and the modal age at death has risen — is well supported. The clinical claim, James Fries's 1980 compression-of-morbidity hypothesis, is that the onset of chronic disability would be postponed faster than death, squeezing illness into a shorter terminal period; that one remains contested, and the persistent gap between life expectancy and healthy life expectancy is the main evidence against it. Compression is also, on its own, evidence that the ceiling has not moved: a curve that squares up against a fixed right-hand edge is a different achievement from a curve that shifts right.
3. Knowledge
4. Compression of mortality (rectangularisation of the survival curve)
5. Maximum human lifespan
6. Connections
7. Maximum human lifespan
8. The Gompertz mortality law
9. Fries proposes the compression of morbidity
10. Compression of mortality (rectangularisation of the survival curve)
11. Jeanne Calment
12. Blue Zones
13. Jeanne Calment dies at 122 years and 164 days
14. A natural limit to human lifespan is argued for, and disputed
15. Calment's record is publicly challenged
16. Evidence
17. Supports the compression-of-morbidity hypothesis as originally stated. V55 verification basis: not retrieved in this session; the paper is cited for the hypothesis, not as evidence that it holds.
18. Supports the paired life expectancy and healthy life expectancy figures and the pandemic-era reversal. V55 verification basis: the report was NOT retrieved; the specific edition carrying the 2021 values must be identified and the figures checked by the curator.