Introduction: The Biodemography of Complex Relationships Among Aging, Health, and Longevity
The growth in interest in the biodemography of human aging, health, and longevity is motivated by the desire to better understand the factors and mechanisms responsible for age patterns and time trends in human mortality rates and survival curves. The availability of human longitudinal and cross-sectional data on populations of study subjects made addressing these research questions possible and stimulated the development of methodological ideas on how these data could be efficiently analyzed. Biodemographic methods of studying human aging, health, and longevity allow for integration and efficient use of data and knowledge from relevant research fields including epidemiology, genetics, sociology, gerontology, environmental sciences, population genetics, etc. This chapter provides a selective account of important historical steps in the development of this research field in which members of the present research team have participated. It also illustrates how the integration of demographic and biological knowledge and data may contribute to progress in the field. Finally, it briefly describes the content and connections among the chapters of this monograph.
