Department of Public Health, Erasmus MC, University Medical Center Rotterdam, PO Box 2040, 3000 CA Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
Department of Public Health, Erasmus MC, University Medical Center Rotterdam, PO Box 2040, 3000 CA Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
J Clin Epidemiol. 2014 May;67(5):596-600. doi: 10.1016/j.jclinepi.2013.07.020. Epub 2013 Nov 28.
Recently, a new interpretation problem of trends in period life expectancy has been discussed in the demographic literature. The so-called tempo effects arise if large numbers of deaths are suddenly postponed. In such conditions, the life table inflates longevity gains in the population because it weights avoided deaths with the full remaining life expectancy. This article explains how such effects occur and indicates their relevance using an illustrative example.
Data of East and West Germany from the Human Mortality Database for the years 1990-2009 were used. We simulated a scenario that contrasts the observed life expectancy in West and East Germany with an alternative one based on the assumption of short-term postponements of deaths.
Our example demonstrates that if tempo effects have distorted changes in life expectancy, the pace of improvement in underlying mortality conditions could be over- and underestimated.
We recommend that the assumptions of the life table, in this case about the remaining life expectancy of avoided deaths, are carefully evaluated in all applications. Interdisciplinary efforts to develop models to detect and quantify tempo effects from life expectancy calculations should be put on the research agenda.
最近，人口统计学文献中讨论了一种新的关于期间预期寿命趋势的解释问题。如果大量死亡突然推迟，就会出现所谓的节奏效应。在这种情况下，生命表会因用完全剩余预期寿命来加权避免的死亡而夸大人口的长寿收益。本文通过一个实例说明了这些效应是如何发生的，并指出了它们的相关性。
使用了来自 1990-2009 年人类死亡率数据库的东德和西德数据。我们模拟了一个场景，该场景将观察到的西德和东德的预期寿命与基于短期推迟死亡假设的替代预期寿命进行了对比。
我们的例子表明，如果节奏效应扭曲了预期寿命的变化，那么潜在死亡率改善的速度就会被高估和低估。
我们建议在所有应用中都要仔细评估生命表的假设，在这种情况下是关于避免死亡的剩余预期寿命的假设。应将开发模型以从预期寿命计算中检测和量化节奏效应的跨学科努力列入研究议程。
