Year: 2019
Type: dissertation
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: In this thesis we adress a hypothesis that suggests that people can postpone their imminent\ndeath (given natural causes). The so-called "Postponement hypothesis" assumes that a\nmeaningful occasion can act as a motivator to prolong life for a short amount of time. We\nconsider a persons birthday as that meaningful occasion and analyze the hypothesis around\nthis date by using tools from a statistical discipline known as Survival analysis. If the hypothesis\nis true it can be expected that the mortality rate should be lower a period before\na person's birthday and, perhaps, higher shortly afterwards. We choose to set this period\nto a limit of 14 days. This would indicate that there is a force which postpones death for\nthe population concerned. The datasets used in analysis are mortality data over people who\nlived to be Supercentenarian and Italian people who became older than 105 years, and also\nprimarily a dataset for South African people who died in the year 2015. The mortality rate\nis summarised by hazard functions, which at each age expressed in days describes the dying\nrate of people who survived to this day. We thereafter apply various parametric models to\nthe hazard, in order to discover any discrepancy around the birthdays. For this a t-test is\nconducted on the mean of the residuals mortality in the birthday period, to see if the mean is\nnon-zero. This should be the case if the days around the birthdays are no different in terms\nof mortality rate compared to other days of the year. The results of our analysis show that\nno postponement of death can be seen for the examined dataset. Instead the data suggest\nthat the mortality rate is actually higher both before and after the birthday. Speculations as\nto why this is the case might be a higher risk associated with the stress of preparing for the\nbirthday.
Authors: Lucas Lazaroo, Natalia Andreeva, Furqan Farooqi, Ingrid Ingemarsson
Language: Swedish
Subfield: Demography
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2954327690