Archive

Congratulation to our Jonas Schöley for successfully defending his PhD thesis

The topic of Jonas’s thesis was "The dynamics of ontogenescence: Modelling age trajectories of feto-infant mortality" and his main supervisor was James Vaupel.

How are elderly women in the UK doing during the COVID-19 pandemic?

Read an opinion piece from our Ella Fegitz and her co-author in Aljazeera.

Welcome to our new Data manager Aleksandrs Aleksandrovs

Aleksandrs’s focus is on developing, maintaining and directing the data infrastructure to support empirical research at CPop. His expertise combines the areas of social science research and IT and is backed by a long-standing contribution to a number of major comparative social science research projects. He holds MSc. in Social Science in Sociology from the University of Latvia.

Merit, luck, and Taxes: How high should taxes be?

As the storm rages around Trump tax returns, a new study of our Pieter Vanhuysse shows that the way how wealth is acquired matters to voters when it comes to setting the rate of tax. Read more about his research in his new article and in a digest published by The Conversation.

Our Jesús-Adrian Álvarez was awarded a Student Presentation Award for the best presentation at the Actuarial Research Conference 2020

The prize was awarded for his paper “Unravelling the Contribution of Financial and Longevity Risks to Stochastic Changes in Life Annuities” at a major conference for actuarial research, where academics and industry actuaries present novel developments and ideas. This year the conference was hosted online by the College of Business of the University of Nebraska.

Welcome to our new Postdoc Isa Trifan

Isa Trifan is a Postdoc at the Centre for Welfare Studies and the Interdisciplinary Centre on Population Dynamics. She is a political philosopher working on normative distributive justice theories, family justice, care theory, and population ageing. At SDU she will collaborate with Prof. Pieter Vanhuysse on an interdisciplinary research project on how welfare states ought to balance the competing claims to social care resources on the part of the elderly, sick or disabled working-age people, and children in a context of population ageing. Before joining SDU, Isa was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Concordia University’s Social Justice Centre, in Montreal. She holds a PhD in Political Philosophy from Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, and spent some time as a visiting student at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, at Oxford.

Welcome to our new PhD Student Florian Ege

Florian is a new PhD student at the Interdisciplinary Centre on Population Dynamics. His research focuses on understanding the effects of varying policy responses to the corona crisis in different countries. More specifically he is interested in comparative methods to disentangle and infer the effects of covid-19 related policies such as increased hygiene, societal lockdowns, facial mask requirements etc., on national excess death rates. For this purpose, Florian is comparing different quantitative approaches to causal inference such as Difference-in-Difference, Synthetic Control and Causal Impact.

Welcome to our new Research Assistant Serena Vigezzi

Welcome to our new Research Assistant Serena Vigezzi. Serena has a Master in Sociology and joined the 2019-2020 EDSD cohort to study Demography. She is currently interested in a variety of subjects, such as the link between mortality and fertility, formal demographic methods and patterns around mortality crises.

Welcome to our new Research Assistant Julia Callaway

Julia is a PhD student in epidemiology at the University of Maryland, and a Research Assistant at CPop. Her research interests are infectious diseases, social, cultural, and structural determinants of health, trends in mortality, and access to healthcare. She has conducted research in South Africa and Sierra Leone, and has worked as a consultant for education- and health-related projects commissioned by the United States government.

Heritability of subfertility among Danish twins

A new study of our Linda Ahrenfeldt, Maarten Wensink, Rune Lindahl-Jacobsen and co-authors investigates the relative contribution of genetic and environmental components to subfertility. It is conducted on monozygotic and dizygotic same-sex twins aged 18+ years from nationwide twin survey (twins born 1931−1976). The analysis shows that the environmental factors explain most of the observed variation in subfertility, when measured as waiting time to pregnancy.

Diversification in causes of death in low-mortality countries

A new paper on variation in causes of death sheds further light on our understanding of population health and ageing. Just published in BMJ Global Health by our Marie-Pier Bergeron Boucher and José Manuel Aburto with Alyson van Raalte.

Understanding Physical and Cognitive Health Decline in the Oldest-Old Population

New paper by our Cosmo Strozza and Virginia Zarulli (with Viviana Egidi) on how demographics, socio-economic characteristics and one’s lifestyle affect changes in physical and cognitive health among the oldest old (aged 90+) published in The Journal of Aging Research.

Cancer rates have risen, but mortality has dropped – here’s what the numbers are saying

An impressive reduction in deaths from cancer is coupled with an equally large increase in the occurrence of cancer across age groups over the last 25 years. Read about the factors behind it in The Conversation by our Maarten Wensink and Silvia Rizzi based on their new paper in Annals of Epidemiology (with co-authors).

Research of our Søren Kjærgaard, Marie-Pier Bergeron-Boucher, Jim Oeppen and co-authors in SDU newsletter Ny Viden (in Danish).

In their research, they analyze the differences in years spent in pension by five socio-economic groups today and the likely distribution in the future.

New Paper: Killing off cohorts: Forecasting mortality of non-extinct cohorts with the penalized composite link model

Joint work of CPop affiliates, Silvia Rizzi, Søren Kjærgaard, Marie-Pier Bergeron Boucher, Rune Lindahl-Jacobsen and James Vaupel with Carlo G. Camarda introduces a novel method to forecast cohort mortality and the cohort life expectancy of non-extinct cohorts. The intent is to complete the mortality profile of cohorts born up to 1960. The proposed method is based on the penalized composite link model for ungrouping data. The performance of the method is investigated using cohort mortality data retrieved from the Human Mortality Database for England & Wales, Sweden, and Switzerland for male and female populations. The article was published in the International Journal of Forecasting.

Our José Manuel Aburto engaging in a fight on COVID 19 in Latin America

Last week Jose Manuel Aburto initiated an open letter to Latin American leaders urging for larger COVID-19 testing in the region, so far signed by more than 250 experts. Based on scientific arguments and highlighting the regional specificities he and his colleagues warn against a rather lax approach towards testing and spread prevention of COVID19 in the Latin American region. Latin American population is particularly vulnerable to COVID19 both due to high prevalence of risky preexisting conditions (such as diabetes and high blood preasure), and large portion of population with no or very low social security. Thus a general lock-down could economically ruin millions while uncontrolled spread would put in danger lives of large numbers of weak ones. Testing, tracking, and isolating should currently be the way in the region.

Welcome to Volha Lazuka our new Assistant Professor at the Department of Business and Economics

Volha is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Business and Economics, SDU. She has an Economics background and obtained her PhD in Economic History in Lund University. Her research interests are public health interventions, demography and labour economics.

New Paper: Lexis fields published in Demographic Research co-authored by CPop affiliate José Manuel Aburto

Lexis surfaces are visualizations designed to show how a given value changes over age and time. Vector fields are two-dimensional representations of two variables: usually direction and speed (or force). The authors aim to increase the dimensionality of patterns shown on the Lexis surface by placing a vector field on the Lexis surface. It shows a new way to see the relationship between life expectancy and lifespan inequality. Published in Demographic Research in the Dataviz collection co-authored by CPop affiliate José Manuel Aburto

European Research Council Advanced Grant goes to James Vaupel for Work on Lifespan Inequalities

James Vaupel from the University of Southern Denmark will develop cutting edge research on old-age mortality, lifespan inequalities, and retirement.

Welcome to our new PostDoc Morgane Tidiere

She is interested in sex-differences in survival across the tree of life and how to translate this knowledge into management of species. She also conducts projects on assessing management improvement across taxa in zoo populations.

Female lifespan is longer in wild mammal animals than in humans

Longer lives are not only for female humans: Mammalian female’s average lifespan is 18.6% longer than that of males. In humans the female advantage is on average 7.8%

Sex differences in adult lifespan and aging rates of mortality across wild mammals – New paper published in PNAS

In human populations, women consistently outlive men, which suggests profound biological foundations for sex differences in survival. Quantifying whether such sex differences are also pervasive in wild mammals is a crucial challenge in both evolutionary biology and biogerontology. By our Dalia A. Conde, Fernando Colchero and their co-authors

How long is life on pension for people from different socio-economic groups in Denmark? How large are the differences and can we expect them to widen or remain the same in the future?

Our new findings are highly relevant to the current debate about the fairness of the Danish pension system. We look at the differences in years spent in pension by five socio-economic groups today and the likely distribution in the future.

Warm welcome to our new director of CPop Demographic unit: Jes Søgaard

Jes has been in Danish health services and policy research for 40 years. Before 1998 he was professor of health economics at University of Southern Denmark (SDU), from 1998 to 2013 he was CEO at the Danish Health Institute (DSI) and from 2014 to 2018 he was director of Documentation and Quality at the Danish Cancer Society. In 2019 he returned to SDU as a professor of health economics and since March 2020 he was director and professor at the CPop Interdisciplinary Centre on Population Dynamics.

Our Rita da Silva was awarded a Villum International Postdoc grant

Our CPop affiliate researcher, Rita da Silva, was awarded a Villum International Postdoc grant of 2.5 million DKK to develop the project Submerging into demography: a new perspective to inform the conservation of aquatic species.

Congratulations to our PhD student Catalina Torres for successfully defending her thesis

Congratulations to our Catalina Torres for successfully defending her PhD with thesis entitled "Life expectancy in urbanizing contexts: patterns and causes of changes in mortality in historical populations". Catalina looked at mortality transitions in the Northern Europe. She did substantial work not only in writing the papers, but also constructing openly accessible databases of historical data. Picture is Catalina’s own graphic summary of possible causes of mortality decline in the past.

Dynamics of life expectancy and life span equality - new paper published in PNAS

New paper! Dynamics of life expectancy and life span equality published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) by our José Manuel Aburto, Francisco Villavicencio, Ugofilippo Basellini, Søren Kjærgaard and James W. Vaupel.

Congratulations to our PhD student Ugofilippo Basellini for successfully defending his thesis

Congratulations to our PhD student Ugofilippo Basellini for successfully defending his thesis "New Approaches in Mortality Modelling and Forecasting".

Congratulations to our PhD student José Manuel Aburto for successfully defending his thesis

Congratulations to our PhD student José Manuel Aburto for successfully defending his thesis "On the Relationship between Life Expectancy and Lifespan Equality".

Congratulations to our PhD student Søren Kjærgaard for successfully defending his thesis

Congratulations to our PhD student Søren Kjærgaard for successfully defending his thesis "New mortality forecasting models and their applications".

Neurotic people more likely to complain about the welfare state

The relationship between neurotic tendencies and political views and behaviours is important in an age of increasingly targeted political communication. Excellent piece by CPop affiliate Pieter Vanhuysse in The Conversation.

The real reason women live longer than men – new study

Check out a new article on the effects of smoking on life expectancy by our Maarten Wensink.

Progression of the smoking epidemic in high-income regions and its effects on male-female survival differences: a cohort by age analysis of 17 countries

We look at effects of smoking on mortality differences between men and women in high income countries over the period 1950 and 2015. The findings suggest that smoking is the major reason for sex differences in mortality in the last decades in high income countries and that about half of the sex differences in life expectancy can be attributed to smoking.

Sex differences in health and mortality by income and income changes

Investigation of mortality and hospitalizations of Danes born between 1935 and 1955 demonstrated that income at ages 55-59 was an important predictor of mortality, with increasing mortality for decreasing income quartile. Income trajectories as a proxy for change in social position have a larger influence on men’s than women’s health and mortality. Income in the late 50s is an important predictor of mortality, particularly for men.

Why men die while women suffer

"Epidemographers and biological demographers at CPop collaborate to push the boundaries of our knowledge about the universality of the male-female health-survival paradox and the potential mechanisms underlying it."

Age-Independent Adult Mortality in a Long-Lived Herb

Not only humans have mortality trajectories worth studying. Johan Dahlgren's paper on estimating mortality trajectories of perennial plants.

How close are we to immortality?

Featuring CPop Professor James Vaupel. Researchers are working to get to the bottom of longevity, unlocking the secrets about how we can extend our lifespans well into our 100's... and beyond.

Silent Non-Exit and Broken Voice: Early Postcommunist Social Policies as Protest-Preempting Strategies

How can pension policies serve larger political causes? CPop Affiliate Pieter Vanhuysse on the strategic use of early retirement in Central and Eastern Europe

How long can humans live?

"Humans are living longer around the world. While there have been obvious ups and downs, life expectancy at birth overall has been steadily increasing for many years. It has more than doubled in the last two centuries." In this article co-authored by CPop's very own James W. Vaupel and Anthony Medford

Venezuela’s soaring murder rate has plunged the nation into a public health crisis

"Over the past three decades, Venezuela has shifted from being a peaceful country, to one of the most violent nations in the world. Decades of poor governance have driven what was once one of Latin America’s most prosperous countries to economic and political ruin. The violent confrontations between anti-government demonstrators and forces loyal to president Nicolás Maduro in recent days, alongside the systemic breakdown of public services, have plunged Venezuela’s population into a public health crisis." In this article co-authored by CPop's very own José Manuel Aburto

Can we expect any time soon a break in the longest lifespan record set by Jeanne Calment? And what does it teach us about human longevity?

New paper from our Anthony Medford and Jim Vaupel in PlosOne

Homicides have a devastating impact on reducing life expectancy in Latin America

Latin America accounts for around a third of the world’s homicides despite having just eight per cent of its population. The study shows that Honduran males are hardest hit, losing six years of life expectancy due to homicides when compared to developed countries. Check out the new paper from CPop's very own Jose Manuel Aburto and Vladimir Canudas Romo in BMJ Global Health.

Understanding extinction

New paper from our Johanna Stärk, Dalia, Conde, Fernando Colcheroand co-authors in Journal of Applied Ecology

Upsurge in homicides decreases life expectancy and life span equality among males in Mexico according to new demographic research

New paper from CPop's very own Jose Manuel Aburto and and his co-author Hiram Beltrán Sánchez in AJPH. A new study published in a leading journal of public health shows that the recent increase of homicides in Mexico negatively impacted life expectancy for males and increased their lifespan inequality.

Measuring Intergenerational Justice for Public Policy

New publication by CPop's very own Pieter Vanhuysse published in Routledge Handbook of Ethics and Public Policy.

Mexican war on drugs has, in places, decreased life expectancy

"Most countries in the world have experienced sizeable improvements in health, living standards and life expectancy since the second half of the 20th century. In Mexico, life expectancy increased for more than six decades – but as we found in our new research, this rate slowed down between 2005 and 2015, and in some states even reversed." Read more in an article co-authored by CPop affiliate José Manuel Aburto.

The urbanization penalty, new research draws lessons about the impact of urbanization on mortality from the past

New paper from our Catalina Torres, Jim Oeppen and their co-author Vladimir Canudas-Romo in Population Studies.

Is plasticity of human lifespans advancing? New evidence from Denmark and Sweden

New paper from our Anthony Medford, Jim Vaupel and co-authors in Demography

Preventing Inequalities in Ageing Societies

Younger generations in Europe today are likely to face higher inequality in old age due to less stable labour market conditions and widening inequalities in the distribution of earnings and household income. Read the policy brief written by CPop's very own Pieter Vanhuysse published by Population Europe.

Pro-Elderly Welfare States within Child-Oriented Societies

New publication by CPop's very own Pieter Vanhuysse.

New Perspectives on Lifespan Inequality co-organized by CPop, Oxford University and Tel-Aviv University - Webinar

Please note an interesting webinar New Perspectives on Lifespan Inequality co-organized by CPop, Oxford University and Tel-Aviv University. The presenters include: Hal Caswell, Alyson van Raalte, Iñaki Permeyer, Fernando Colchero, Michal Engelman, and Joseph Lariscy. The webinar is on the 21st of January from 3 to 6 pm

You are welcome to participate at the PhD defence of our Ilya Kashnitsky

Ilya’s defense will take place on October 15 at 11 am physically at the University of Groningen or online. In his thesis ‘Changing regional inequalities in ageing across Europe’ he explores the role of demographic change in the evolution of inequalities in population age structures across regions of Europe. The aim of the thesis is to increase our understanding of the demographic processes that shape regional population age structures, and how these processes are interrelated with regional economic development. The results of hi PhD research has been published in the world leading journal The Lancet, and discipline leading journals Population Studies and Demographic Research.