Life expectancy is higher in Japan than in the United States. We compared the prevalence of clinically recognized risk factors in the two countries to explore the possibility that differences in these likely precursors to disease and death are linked to the paths to higher mortality for...

To analyse functional status transitions in the older population better, we fit a semi-Markov process model to data from the 1992-2002 Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey. We used an analogue of the stochastic EM algorithm to address the problem of left censoring of spells in longitudinal data....

In this paper, we lay the initial groundwork for anticipating Indonesia’s future burden of disease by developing a demographic model of population health. We develop this model within the analytic framework of a Markov-based multistate life table model to calculate an important indicator of...

This article updates trends from five national U.S. surveys to determine whether the prevalence of activity limitations among the older population continued to decline in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Findings across studies suggest that personal care and domestic activity...

The prevalence of diseases increased among older Americans in recent years. The largest increases have been in the proportion of the population with heart disease and cancer. There has also been a decrease in the number of older persons with no disease and an increase in the proportion of people...