Long term mortality trends behind low life expectancy of Danish women

Abstract

Study objective: To examine the long time mortality trends of women in Denmark. Design: Age-period-cohort analysis. Setting: To search for possible causes we analysed mortality rates for all Danish women and men aged 40-84 during 1960-1999. Age-period-cohort modelling was used, handling the well known indeterminacy in a sensitivity analysis. Main results: The results indicate that the high risk of dying among Danish women is associated with being born between the two world wars. A similar pattern was not seen for men. Conclusion: The rather simple descriptive exploration in the framework of age-period-cohort modelling used, revealed a pattern not reflected by the commonly used life expectancy calculation. It is suggested that future studies on the low life expectancy of Danish women focus on the "between wars" generations identified with a high risk of dying in this study.