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"Vallin, Jacques"
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Why are supercentenarians so frequently found in French Overseas Departments? The cases of Guadeloupe and Martinique
Many more cases of supercentenarians are observed in the French
Départements d’Outre-Mer
(DOM) than in metropolitan France. A first possible explanation is that the standard French protocol for validating age does not sufficiently cover DOMs. However, if additional checks can confirm the verity of this phenomenon, forming explanatory hypotheses can be relevant and quite interesting. Thanks to an INED research funding, a special protocol of deep age checking has been established to be applied to the two DOMs where the phenomenon is the most pronounced: Guadeloupe and Martinique. First results not only show that combining several additional checks does not leave much room for further doubting the ages of supercentenarians but they also support some arguments in favor of a possible fundamental explanation: genetic selection due to the extreme severity of mortality inflicted on their slave ancestors.
Journal Article
The Recent Mortality Decline in Russia: Beginning of the Cardiovascular Revolution?
The health situation in Russia has often been characterized as a long-running crisis. From the 1960s until the beginning of the 2000s, the declining life expectancy trend was substantially interrupted only twice: once in the mid-1980s as a result of Gorbachev's anti-alcohol campaign, and again at the end of the 1990s as a result of the \"rebound\" effect following the dramatic rise in mortality associated with the acute socioeconomic crisis. In both cases, the progress made proved to be short-lived. A third mortality decline in Russia began in 2003 and is still ongoing. We investigate the components and driving forces of this new development, in particular the role played by cardiovascular diseases. Using cause-specific mortality data, we identify the main features of the recent improvements and compare these features with those observed in selected European countries, specifically France, Poland, and Estonia. Our aim is to gauge whether the features of the improvements in these countries are similar to those of the recent advancements made in Russia. Although the recent improvements in Russia have features in common with initial stages of prior mortality declines in other countries and may support optimism about the future, a return to mortality stagnation cannot be ruled out.
Journal Article
Is East-West Life Expectancy Gap Narrowing in the Enlarged European Union?
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990 and EU enlargement in 2004 are two major political events in the recent history of the Central and Eastern European region. By systematically comparing the changes and differences in life expectancy at birth between the seven new member countries from Central and Eastern Europe and more advanced countries of the EU-15, this article attempts to identify the vanguards and laggards in the health convergence process before and after the 2004 EU enlargement. The results of decomposition analysis highlight the changing patterns of age- and cause-specific contributions to the differences in life expectancy. Finally, we focus on the variations in the progress in reducing the burden of cardiovascular diseases and external causes of death, which were known to be responsible for the long-term mortality crisis during the period of communist rule. Our findings suggest that the collapse of the communist regimes led to immediate positive changes in the Central European countries. At the same time, health disadvantages persisted and even worsened in the Baltic countries. Later on, joining the EU in 2004 was not accompanied by immediate systematic convergence of life expectancy. However, very rapid progress in the initially worst performing Baltic countries after 2007 and especially during the 2010s, may suggest a delayed positive impact of EU enlargement leading to decreasing longevity disadvantage. The convergence process after 2004 was generally slower in the initially better-performing four Central European countries. Despite these country-specific variations, Czechia, Poland, and, especially, Estonia remain clear health vanguards in the region. Further progress requires much more systematic efforts to combat cardiovascular diseases and the persisting burden of excess male mortality at adult working ages.
* This article belongs to a special issue on “Demographic Developments in Eastern and Western Europe Before and After the Transformation of Socialist Countries”.
Journal Article
The question of the human mortality plateau
The debate about limits to the human life span is often based on outcomes from mortality at the oldest ages among longevity pioneers. To this day, scholars disagree on the existence of a late-life plateau in human mortality. Amid various statistical analysis frameworks, the parametric proportional hazards model is a simple and valuable approach to test the presence of a plateau by assuming different baseline hazard functions on individual-level data. We replicate and propose some improvements to the methods of Barbi et al. (2018) to explore whether death rates reach a plateau at later ages in the French population as it does for Italians in the original study. We use a large set of exceptionally reliable data covering the most recently extinct birth cohorts, 1883-1901, where all 3,789 members who were born and died in France, were followed from age 105 onward. Individual life trajectories are modeled by a proportional hazards model with fixed covariates (gender, birth cohort) and a Gompertz baseline hazard function. In contrast with Barbi et al. (2018)'s results, our Gompertz slope parameter estimate is statistically different from zero across all model specifications, suggesting death rates continue to increase beyond 105 years old in the French population. In addition, we find no significant birth cohort effect but a significant male disadvantage in mortality after age 105. Using the best data currently available, we did not find any evidence of a mortality plateau in French individuals aged 105 and older.
Journal Article
Recent Life Expectancy Divergence in Baltic Countries
Until the end of the 1990s, mortality patterns and trends in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were remarkably similar. However, from the year 2000 onwards, life expectancy trends in the three countries started to diverge. In particular, sustainable progress in Estonia over the period 2000-2007 contrasts with stagnation in Latvia, and even worsening trends in Lithuania. These contradictory changes seem to be mainly explained by contrasting dynamics in mortality from cardiovascular diseases, external causes of death and digestive system diseases. Whereas cardiovascular and external-cause mortality declined in Estonia and Latvia, worsening or stagnation of mortality from these causes of death was observed in Lithuania. The negative mortality changes in Lithuania were also reinforced by a striking increase in mortality from alcohol-related digestive system diseases. The findings suggest that the divergence in health trends between the three countries may be attributable to their varying degrees of success in implementing structural health care reforms and specific health policy measures. By contrast, the very recent improvement (since 2008) is parallel in the three countries and is largely because of the introduction of rather similar anti-alcohol measures. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]
Journal Article
Adult mortality patterns in the former Soviet Union’s southern tier
While the health crisis in the former USSR has been well-documented in the case of Russia and other northern former Soviet republics, little is known about countries located in the southern tier of the region, i.e., the Caucasus and Central Asia.
This paper presents new mortality information from two Caucasian countries, Georgia and Armenia. Results are compared with information from two relevant countries previously examined in the literature, Kyrgyzstan and Russia.
Using official statistics (with adjustments when necessary), we compare adult mortality patterns in the four countries since 1979, for all causes and by cause for the recent period. For Kyrgyzstan results are presented by ethnicity, as its mortality levels have been impacted by its large Slavic population.
Adult mortality patterns in Armenia and Georgia have been more favorable than in Russia. This appears to be due to a large extent to lower mortality from alcohol-related causes. Mortality patterns in these Caucasian republics resemble those observed in Kyrgyzstan, especially when considering the native portion of the population.
As far as mortality is concerned, Armenia and Georgia have weathered the collapse of the Soviet Union better than Russia. These results document a distinct southern tier pattern of adult mortality in the former Soviet Union.
This article enriches our understanding of the health crisis in the former Soviet Union by bringing new information from two lesser-known countries and further documenting the scale of heterogeneity in mortality experiences across this vast region.
Journal Article