title: Explaining mortality rate plateaus.
abstract: We propose a stochastic model of aging to explain deviations from exponential growth in mortality rates commonly observed in empirical studies. Mortality rate plateaus are explained as a generic consequence of considering death in terms of first passage times for processes undergoing a random walk with drift. Simulations of populations with age-dependent distributions of viabilities agree with a wide array of experimental results. The influence of cohort size is well accounted for by the stochastic nature of the model.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. jsweitz@segovia.mit.edu
authors.forename: J S
authors.initials: JS
authors.lastname: Weitz
authors.forename: H B
authors.initials: HB
authors.lastname: Fraser
mesh_terms: D000375:Aging; D000818:Animals; D009026:Mortality / Q000639:trends*; D011157:Population Dynamics