The Demography and Biodemography of Aging

The demography of aging involves the investigation of trends in vital statistics in national populations and among population subgroups – including the study of shifts in the relative age structure of populations and the duration of life of individuals and the forces that influence their change over time. The biodemography of aging is a new scientific discipline that began in 1992 when the science of evolutionary biology, formulated in the twentieth century, was used to explain age patterns of death in humans first identified in the early nineteenth century. Both fields of science are now central to understanding how long humans can live and whether health span can be extended by modifying the underlying biological process of aging.