January 15, 2013 | News | New Research Project

From disparities in mortality trends to future health challenges

Why do some countries and population groups experiencecontinuous improvements in health and survival while others are lagging behind? A French-German team of scientists from the MPIDR and the French Institut National Études Démographiques (INED) aims to address this question.

The project, jointly supervised by France Meslé (INED) and Domantas Jasilionis (MPIDR), will be co-funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) and the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche.

The main aim of the collaborative project is to better understand the historical divergence in mortality within the developed world in order to identify the factors of mortality change and foresee future health challenges. The researchers will use detailed cause-of-death statistics as principal source to unravel the causes of the observed changes in human survival and longevity.

The team of German and French researchers will build a large international database containing homogeneous and consistent time-series of cause-specific mortality data. The team is planning to reconstruct these data for nine industrialized countries: Germany, the USA, Japan, Russia, Germany, France, Spain, Poland, and England and Wales. The new data, comparable across countries and time, will be used to develop new approaches and analytical techniques allowing to link cause-specific mortality with measures of survival and longevity.