At the 2023 Living to 100 Symposium, Prof. Roland Rau presented his and his collaborators’ research (Ebeling et al. 2021) on the slope of the mortality curve for people suffering from different chronic diseases. They studied the question, whether pre-existing conditions lead to an acceleration or deceleration of the rate of ageing, or whether it doesn’t change at all. While the short-term impact varies a lot by disease, in the long run, the rate of change in mortality rates by age returns to its original slope, even though the level of mortality itself will remain elevated.
Enjoy the presentation Roland gave in Orlando in January 2023, and read a copy of the original journal article published in Age and Ageing, the journal of the British Geriatrics Society:
Marcus Ebeling, Roland Rau, Håkan Malmström, Anders Ahlbom, Karin Modig, The rate by which mortality increase with age is the same for those who experienced chronic disease as for the general population, Age and Ageing, Volume 50, Issue 5, September 2021, Pages 1633–1640, https://doi.org/10.1093/ageing/afab085
