Medical Biomathematics and Biometrics Commons^™

Modeling The Effect Of Alzheimer's Disease On Mortality, Elizabeth Johnson, Ron Brookmeyer, Kathryn Ziegler-Graham

Ron Brookmeyer

Mortality rate ratios and the associated proportional hazards models have been used to summarize the effect of Alzheimer's disease on longevity. However, the mortality rate ratios vary by age and therefore do not provide a simple parsimonious summary of the effect of the disease on lifespan. Instead, we propose a new parameter that is defined by an additive multistate model. The proposed multistate model accounts for different stages of disease progression. The underlying assumption of the model is that the effect of disease on mortality is to add a constant amount to death rates once the disease progresses from an …