Life expectancy has risen sharply in the last 50 years. We applied the classic Michaelis-Menten enzyme kinetics to demonstrate a novel mathematical relationship of income to childhood (aged 0-5 years) and adult (aged 15-60 years) survival. We treat income as a substrate that is catalyzed to increase survival (from technologies that income buys) for 180 countries from 1970 and 2007. Michaelis-Me...

BACKGROUND There are few data on life expectancy in patients with hereditary haemorrhagic telangiectasia (HHT), a disorder with life-threatening complications. METHODS Seventy HHT patients provided data on age and age at death of their HHT-affected parent, which was compared with that of the parent's non-affected partner. RESULTS At the time of the study, 40 HHT parents (57.1%) vs. 36 (51.4...

BACKGROUND In low-mortality countries, life expectancy is increasing steadily. This increase can be disentangled into two separate components: the delayed incidence of death (i.e. the rectangularization of the survival curve) and the shift of maximal age at death to the right (i.e. the extension of longevity). METHODS We studied the secular increase of life expectancy at age 50 in nine Europe...

Preventive health care decisions and recommendations become more complex as the population ages. The leading causes of death (i.e., heart disease, malignant neoplasms, cerebrovascular disease, and chronic lower respiratory disease) among older adults mirror the actual causes of death (i.e., tobacco use, poor diet, and physical inactivity) among persons of all ages. Many aspects of mortality in ...

Emotional perception has been extensively studied, but only a few studies have investigated the brain activity preceding exposure to emotional stimuli, especially when they are triggered by the subject himself. Here, we sought to investigate the emotional expectancy by means of movement related cortical potentials (MRCPs) in a self-paced task, in which the subjects begin the affective experienc...

HEALTH ISSUE: The sex differences in mortality, life expectancy, and, to a lesser extent, health expectancy, are well recognized in Canada and internationally. However, the factors explaining these differences between women and men are not well understood. This chapter explores the contribution of various causes of death (such as preventable, and sex-specific deaths) on these differences betwee...

BACKGROUND Limited evidence suggests that persons with end-stage renal disease (ESRD) may be at increased risk for malignancy. The appropriateness of screening procedures in this population has not been evaluated. OBJECTIVE To determine the relative cost-effectiveness of hypothetical cancer screening programs in the population with ESRD compared with the general population. METHODS We perfo...

BACKGROUND/AIMS Factors including rate of disease progression, different aspects of cholinesterase inhibitor (ChEI) treatment, and use of community-based services might affect the longitudinal outcome of Alzheimer's disease (AD). Whether these factors alter life expectancy in AD is unclear. We therefore examined the association between long-term ChEI therapy and survival. METHODS The present ...

Scanning 3000 cases admitted for rehabilitation after cerebrovascular accident over a 20 year period produced a sample of 1369 subjects, without age restrictions, admitted within six months of a first stroke of thrombotic etiology. In this sample, survival rates showed no significant difference between men and women. Age at onset, however, clearly influenced survival changes; the expected mean ...