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Mikhail Kovtun

Biostatistician III
Center for Population Health & Aging
Box 90408, Durham, NC 27708-0408
Erwin Mill Building, 2024 W. Main St., Room A110B, Durham, NC 27705

Selected Publications


Decomposition of disparities in life expectancy with applications to administrative health claims and registry data.

Journal Article Theoretical population biology · October 2023 Research shows that geographic disparities in life expectancy between leading and lagging states are increasing over time while racial disparities between Black and White Americans have been going down. In the 65+ age strata morbidity is the most common ca ... Full text Cite

Forecasting prevalence and mortality of Alzheimer's disease using the partitioning models.

Journal Article Exp Gerontol · April 2023 OBJECTIVES: Health forecasting is an important aspect of ensuring that the health system can effectively respond to the changing epidemiological environment. Common models for forecasting Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (AD/ADRD) are based on sim ... Full text Link to item Cite

Underlying mechanisms of change in cancer prevalence in older U.S. adults: contributions of incidence, survival, and ascertainment at early stages.

Journal Article Cancer Causes Control · September 2022 PURPOSE: To quantitatively evaluate contributions of trends in incidence, relative survival, and stage at diagnosis to the dynamics in the prevalence of major cancers (lung, prostate, colon, breast, urinary bladder, ovaries, stomach, pancreas, esophagus, k ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Comparative Loss-of-Function Screens Reveal ABCE1 as an Essential Cellular Host Factor for Efficient Translation of Paramyxoviridae and Pneumoviridae.

Journal Article mBio · May 14, 2019 Paramyxoviruses and pneumoviruses have similar life cycles and share the respiratory tract as a point of entry. In comparative genome-scale siRNA screens with wild-type-derived measles, mumps, and respiratory syncytial viruses in A549 cells, a human lung a ... Full text Link to item Cite

Hidden heterogeneity in Alzheimer's disease: Insights from genetic association studies and other analyses.

Journal Article Experimental gerontology · July 2018 Despite evident success in clarifying many important features of Alzheimer's disease (AD) the efficient methods of its prevention and treatment are not yet available. The reasons are likely to be the fact that AD is a multifactorial and heterogeneous healt ... Full text Cite

Genome Architecture and Evolution of a Unichromosomal Asexual Nematode.

Journal Article Current biology : CB · October 2017 Asexual reproduction in animals, though rare, is the main or exclusive mode of reproduction in some long-lived lineages. The longevity of asexual clades may be correlated with the maintenance of heterozygosity by mechanisms that rearrange genomes and reduc ... Full text Cite

Corrigendum: Pleiotropic Meta-Analyses of Longitudinal Studies Discover Novel Genetic Variants Associated with Age-Related Diseases.

Journal Article Frontiers in genetics · January 2017 [This corrects the article on p. 179 in vol. 7, PMID: 27790247.]. ... Full text Cite

Pleiotropic Associations of Allelic Variants in a 2q22 Region with Risks of Major Human Diseases and Mortality.

Journal Article PLoS genetics · November 2016 Gaining insights into genetic predisposition to age-related diseases and lifespan is a challenging task complicated by the elusive role of evolution in these phenotypes. To gain more insights, we combined methods of genome-wide and candidate-gene studies. ... Full text Cite

Resistance to stresses and reliability of biological systems: Insights for genetic studies of human aging, health, and longevity

Conference Proceedings - 2nd International Symposium on Stochastic Models in Reliability Engineering, Life Science, and Operations Management, SMRLO 2016 · March 11, 2016 Connection between stress resistance and longevity in biological organisms is widely discussed and confirmed experimentally. Much less is known about the roles of genetic and non-genetic factors in regulation of such connection. Earlier studies emphasized ... Full text Open Access Cite

How the effects of aging and stresses of life are integrated in mortality rates: insights for genetic studies of human health and longevity.

Journal Article Biogerontology · February 2016 Increasing proportions of elderly individuals in developed countries combined with substantial increases in related medical expenditures make the improvement of the health of the elderly a high priority today. If the process of aging by individuals is a ma ... Full text Open Access Cite

Pleiotropic Meta-Analyses of Longitudinal Studies Discover Novel Genetic Variants Associated with Age-Related Diseases.

Journal Article Frontiers in genetics · January 2016 Age-related diseases may result from shared biological mechanisms in intrinsic processes of aging. Genetic effects on age-related diseases are often modulated by environmental factors due to their little contribution to fitness or are mediated through cert ... Full text Open Access Cite

Pure and Confounded Effects of Causal SNPs on Longevity: Insights for Proper Interpretation of Research Findings in GWAS of Populations with Different Genetic Structures.

Journal Article Frontiers in genetics · January 2016 This paper shows that the effects of causal SNPs on lifespan, estimated through GWAS, may be confounded and the genetic structure of the study population may be responsible for this effect. Simulation experiments show that levels of linkage disequilibrium ... Full text Open Access Cite

Linear Latent Structure Analysis: Modeling High-Dimensional Survey Data

Chapter · January 1, 2016 The formulation of the recently developed Linear Latent Structures (LLS) analysis, its statistical properties, the algorithm for parameter estimation and its implementation, simulation studies, and application of LLS model to the National Long Term Care Su ... Full text Cite

Genetics of aging, health, and survival: dynamic regulation of human longevity related traits.

Journal Article Frontiers in genetics · January 2015 BackgroundThe roles of genetic factors in human longevity would be better understood if one can use more efficient methods in genetic analyses and investigate pleiotropic effects of genetic variants on aging and health related traits.Data and ... Full text Open Access Cite

ON IDENTIFIABILITY OF MIXTURES OF INDEPENDENT DISTRIBUTION LAWS, .

Journal Article ESAIM. Probability and statistics = Probabilites et statistique : P & S · January 2014 We consider representations of a joint distribution law of a family of categorical random variables (i.e., a multivariate categorical variable) as a mixture of independent distribution laws (i.e. distribution laws according to which random va ... Full text Open Access Cite

Genome-wide direct target analysis reveals a role for SHORT-ROOT in root vascular patterning through cytokinin homeostasis.

Journal Article Plant physiology · November 2011 SHORT-ROOT (SHR) is a key regulator of root growth and development in Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana). Made in the stele, the SHR protein moves into an adjacent cell layer, where it specifies endodermal cell fate; it is also essential for apical meriste ... Full text Open Access Cite

Linear latent structure analysis and modelling of multiple categorical variables

Journal Article Computational and Mathematical Methods in Medicine · January 1, 2009 Linear latent structure analysis is a new approach for investigation of population heterogeneity using high-dimensional categorical data. In this approach, the population is represented by a distribution of latent vectors, which play the role of heterogene ... Full text Cite

Linear latent structure analysis: Mixture distribution models with linear constraints

Journal Article Statistical Methodology · January 1, 2007 A new method for analyzing high-dimensional categorical data, Linear Latent Structure (LLS) analysis, is presented. LLS models belong to the family of latent structure models, which are mixture distribution models constrained to satisfy the local independe ... Full text Cite

Population models for the health effects of ionizing radiation.

Journal Article Radiats Biol Radioecol · 2006 In this paper we review recently-developed extension frailty, quadratic hazard, stochastic process, microsimulation, and linear latent structure models, which have the potential to describe the health effects of human populations exposed to ionizing radiat ... Link to item Cite

Fuzzy set analyses of genetic determinants of health and disability status.

Journal Article Statistical methods in medical research · October 2004 Analyses of complex genotype-phenotype relations require new statistical procedures because of the potentially high dimensionability of those relations which are expressed with both measurement error and stochasticity in the correlation function. We propos ... Full text Cite