4 ms·
What was their average life expectancy? 45? How many were living long enough to develop Alzheimer's? Am I missing something?
by aranchelk 3y ago
What was their average life expectancy? 45? How many were living long enough to develop Alzheimer's?
Am I missing something?
- madaxe_again 3y agoLife expectancy is heavily skewed by infant mortality, which was of course rampant. If you made it past your tenth birthday, you had a 50% chance of making it to 50, and a 25% chance of making it to 65. En masse, that makes for an amply large population of people in the age range for dementia to draw conclusions. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_Roman_Empire https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_Roman_Empi...
- chris37879 3y agoAverage life expectancy is a very bad number to compare across such vast amounts of time, especially when you're looking at a disease that only happens in advanced age. Infant mortality rates were dramatically higher in the past and drag that average way down, for instance, say I have a 1 day old infant, and a 100 year old person and they both die, they have a combined 'average life expectancy' of 50 years old. But, once you made it out of the 'childhood illness' mortality stage, most folks could expect to see 70 years old. https://sc.edu/uofsc/posts/2022/08/conversation-old-age-is-not-a-modern-phenomenon.php https://sc.edu/uofsc/posts/2022/08/conversation-old-age-is-n...