Is collective efficacy age graded? The development and evaluation of a new measure of collective efficacy for older adults.

Objectives. Community processes are key determinants of older adults' ability to age in place, but existing scales measuring these constructs may not provide accurate, unbiased measurements among older adults because they were designed with the concerns of child-rearing respondents in mind. This study examines the properties of a new theory-based measure of collective efficacy (CE) that accounts for the perspectives of older residents.

Comments on dietary restriction, Okinawa diet and longevity.

Longevity in Okinawa is considered to be a result of traditional low calorie diet. Le Bourg suggests that Okinawa is an example of severe malnutrition, which is harmful for later generations. We believe that current loss of longevity advantage in Okinawa is a result of diet westernization and that the dietary restriction is a valid way of life extension in humans.

Demographic consequences of defeating aging.

A common objection against starting a large-scale biomedical war on aging is the fear of catastrophic population consequences (overpopulation). This fear is only exacerbated by the fact that no detailed demographic projections for radical life extension scenario have been conducted so far. This study explores different demographic scenarios and population projections, in order to clarify what could be the demographic consequences of a successful biomedical war on aging.

Search for mechanisms of exceptional human longevity.

This study presents initial findings of a new ongoing research project aimed to identify important predictors and mechanisms of exceptional human longevity. For this purpose the detailed data on long-lived people surviving to 100 years in the Unites States are collected, validated, and analyzed. The study found that being born to a young mother is an important predictor of person's longevity.

Do marriages forget their past? Marital stability in post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia.

This paper assesses the impact of three main destabilizing factors on marital stability in Cambodia: the radical reformation of marriage under the Khmers Rouges (KR); the imbalanced gender ratio among marriageable adults resulting from gendered mortality during the KR regime; and, after decades of isolation from the West, a period of rapid social change. Although there is evidence of declining marital stability in the most recent period, marriages contracted under the KR appear as stable as adjacent marriage cohorts. Thesefindings suggest that the conditions under which spouses were initially paired matter less for marital stability than does their contemporaneous environment.

The Role of Cohabitation in Family Formation: The United States in Comparative Perspective.

The prevalence of nonmarital cohabitation is steadily increasing in the United States. In evaluating the contribution of this new living arrangement to family formation, analysts have relied primarily on comparisons between individuals who cohabit and those who do not. We complement this line of inquiry by comparing the United States and 16 industrialized nations.

Does exceptional human longevity come with a high cost of infertility? Testing the evolutionary theories of aging.

The purpose of this study is to test the prediction of the evolutionary theory of aging that human longevity comes with the cost of impaired reproductive success (higher infertility rates). Our validation study is based on the analysis of particularly reliable genealogical records for European aristocratic families using a logistic regression model with childlessness as a dependent (outcome) variable, and woman's life span, year of birth, age at marriage, husband's age at marriage, and husband's life span as independent (predictor) variables. We found that the woman's exceptional longevity did not increase her chances of being infertile.

The reliability-engineering approach to the problem of biological aging.

We applied reliability theory to explain aging of biological species and came to the following conclusions: (1) Redundancy is a key notion for understanding aging and the systemic nature of aging in particular. Systems, which are redundant in numbers of irreplaceable elements, do deteriorate (i.e.

The uneven tides of the health transition.

As spectacular mortality reductions have occurred in all developing nations at all national income levels, the epidemiologic transition theory suggests that cause-of-mortality patterns should shift from communicable diseases especially prevalent among infants and children to problems resulting from non-communicable conditions at older ages. Global estimates confirm this expectation, and mortality from these latter conditions has become predominant worldwide, leading some observers to argue for a corresponding shift in the public health agenda. In this paper, we nuance this finding by studying the important poverty-gradient concealed in the global estimates.

A description of child illness and treatment behavior in Guatemala.

This paper uses a new calendar design implemented in the Guatemalan Survey of Family Health to analyze diarrheal and respiratory illness among children. The calendar provides a much richer description of child illness and treatment behavior than do conventional data typically collected in health interview surveys. The resulting estimates reveal that Guatemalan children experience high rates of diarrheal and respiratory illness and that these illnesses often involve multiple symptoms that only partially overlap one another.