A better understanding of processes and mechanisms linking human aging with changes in health status and survival requires methods capable of analyzing new data that take into account knowledge about these processes accumulated ...

We address comments from the three discussants of our paper, paying particular attention to the properties of our model likely to be of interest in new applications to complex dynamic systems. © 2012 Elsevier B.V.

BACKGROUND: In genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of human life span, none of the genetic variants has reached the level of genome-wide statistical significance. The roles of such variants in life span regulation remain ...