Research Group

Mortality Inequalities

At a Glance Projects Publications Team

Project

Modeling the Timing of Health Deterioration and Death: A Formal Demographic Approach (Dissertation)

Chiara Micheletti, Alyson van Raalte, Iñaki Permanyer (Centre for Demographic Studies (CED), Spain); in Collaboration with Francisco Villavicencio (University of Barcelona, Spain), Pekka Martikainen (MPIDR), Shubhankar Sharma (University of Helsinki, Finland)

Detailed Description

Chronic conditions are among the leading causes of mortality worldwide, but their population impact extends well beyond death. A substantial share of individuals live for many years with chronic diseases before dying, making chronic morbidity an increasingly central dimension of population health in an era of extended lifespans. Understanding the consequences of chronic conditions therefore requires moving beyond a sole focus on mortality.

The aim of this doctoral project is to apply and extend multidimensional age-at-death distributions, a recently introduced framework, to develop novel methodological tools for analyzing how survival with chronic conditions has evolved at the population level. These distributions capture not only when individuals die, but also how their lifespans are composed in terms of years spent with and without chronic conditions, and thus enable us to better understand how chronic morbidity is experienced: i.e., how many people avoid it, how many develop it, and how long individuals live with it before death.

The project takes advantage of exceptionally detailed register data from Finland and Denmark to examine these patterns across time and other relevant dimensions, such as sex and educational attainment. Just as inequalities in lifespan have become a central concern in demographic research, inequalities in health and in survival with disease are equally critical. Understanding who benefits from longer lives, and whether those additional years are spent in good or poor health, is essential for informing debates on health care demand, pension systems, and population aging more broadly.

Publications

Micheletti, C.; Strozza, C.; van Raalte, A. A.; Permanyer, I.:

Compression or expansion of morbidity: evaluating life expectancy with and without cardiovascular diseases in Denmark

MPIDR Working Paper WP-2026-027. (2026)    

Micheletti, C.; Strozza, C.; van Raalte, A. A.; Permanyer, I.:

Compression or expansion of morbidity: evaluating life expectancy with and without cardiovascular diseases in Denmark

Population Health Metrics, 1–15. (2026)    

Micheletti, C.; Villavicencio, F.:

On the relationship between life expectancy, modal age at death, and the threshold age of the life table entropy

Demographic Research 51:24, 763–788. (2024)