Older People Have More, and More Diverse, Chronic Comorbidities: Tests of Taylor’s Law of Fluctuation Scaling in Four U.S. Health Systems
Event Details
- Type
- Monday Lecture Series
- Speaker(s)
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Joel Cohen, Ph.D., Dr.P.H., Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor and head, Laboratory of Populations, The Rockefeller University
- Speaker bio(s)
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The Charlson Comorbidity Index (CCI) combines a person’s concurrent medical conditions (comorbidities) in 17 categories, such as heart disease, AIDS, or cancer, to predict the person’s probability of death within 10 years. People’s average CCI increases with age. We find that the variability among people, not only the average, of CCI increases from age 18 to age 90 in 238,156 adults in low-income communities cared for by two health systems in Chicago, Illinois, and two health systems in New York City. In Chicago, as age increases, the variance of CCI approximates a power function of the mean CCI. This quantitative relationship, not previously recognized, confirms Taylor's law of fluctuation scaling. By contrast, in New York, the variance of CCI increases with the mean CCI more slowly than a power function. Within each age group and health system, the frequency distribution of CCI is well approximated by a negative binomial distribution. The Cohen lab speculates on possible sources of the differences between Chicago and New York. This is joint work with Community Engaged Research, The Rockefeller University Center for Clinical and Translational Science, in partnership with Clinical Directors Network.
Joel E. Cohen studies living populations using mathematical, statistical, and computational tools. Living populations have “ensemble properties,” such as birth rates, death rates, and growth rates, that are not characteristics of any individual. Cohen develops concepts helpful for understanding ensemble properties of human and non-human populations, and tests these concepts in applications to human fertility, mortality, and migration; farms, fisheries, forests, wildlife, and weather patterns; infectious diseases; and food webs.
Cohen received his A.B., A.M., Ph.D., M.P.H. and Dr.P.H. from Harvard University. He became an assistant professor at Harvard in 1971 and an associate professor in 1972. He moved to Rockefeller as a professor in 1975 and was named the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor in 1996. In addition, Cohen has also been a professor at Columbia University since 1995. Among many honors, Cohen was a 1981 MacArthur Fellow and the recipient of the Fred L. Soper Award from the Pan American Health and Education Foundation (1997) and the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement from the University of Southern California (1999). Cohen is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the Council on Foreign Relations.MLS lectures are only open to the RU community and will be taking place in Carson Family Auditorium and virtually via Zoom. Virtual participants are required to log in with their RU Zoom account and use their RU email address and password for authentication. We recommend signing out of VPN prior to logging in to the lecture. Please do not share the link or post on social media.
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- Campus Only