Preston, Samuel
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Publication Child mortality differentials in Sudan(1981-08-01) Farah, Adbul-Aziz; Preston, SamuelSudan presents an excellent opportunity for studying mortality conditions in poor countries. It is one of the 25 "least developed" countries by U.N. designation, most of whom have very little information on mortality and general health conditions. As the largest African country in area, Sudan is also a land of rich ecological contrast, stretching from desert areas in the North through savannah areas to dense equatorial jungle in the South. The northern portions are Arabic and Islamic, the southern portions black African. The 1955/56 census enumerated 597 tribes speaking some 115 languages. Aridity in the North and swamps in the South have retarded the development of these areas and fostered nomadism, population concentration is greatest in the middle belt and particularly along the Nile and its tributaries. This paper has since been published as: "Child Mortality Differentials in Sudan," by Abdul-Aziz Farah; Samuel H. Preston in, Population and Development Review, Vol. 8, No. 2. (Jun., 1982), pp. 365-383. http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0098-7921%28198206%298%3A2%3C365%3ACMDIS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-4Publication Using Successive Censuses to Reconstruct the African-American Population, 1930-1990(1996-12-01) Preston, Samuel H.; Elo, Irma T.; Gale, LynnThe Census Bureau's program to estimate the completeness of decennial census counts for age, sex, and race groups relies principally upon what it terms "demographic analysis." The essence of this approach is to introduce extraneous information on the number of births, deaths, and migrations, derived from non-census sources, to estimate the true size of each birth cohort at the time of a census (Robinson et al., 1993; Himes and Clogg, 1992). Comparison of this alternative estimate to the census count provides an estimate of the degree of under - or over-enumeration in the census, often termed the census undercount. Acceptance of the estimated undercount implies that the census itself is irrelevant to estimating the true size of the population; whatever deficiencies it contained would be accurately and completely revealed by comparison to the estimate based on demographic analysis.Publication Low Life Expectancy in the United States: Is the Health Care System at Fault?(2010-01-01) Preston, Samuel HY; Ho, Jessica YLife expectancy in the United States fares poorly in international comparisons, primarily because of high mortality rates above age 50. Its low ranking is often blamed on a poor performance by the health care system rather than on behavioral or social factors. This paper presents evidence on the relative performance of the US health care system using death avoidance as the sole criterion. We find that, by standards of OECD countries, the US does well in terms of screening for cancer, survival rates from cancer, survival rates after heart attacks and strokes, and medication of individuals with high levels of blood pressure or cholesterol. We consider in greater depth mortality from prostate cancer and breast cancer, diseases for which effective methods of identification and treatment have been developed and where behavioral factors do not play a dominant role. We show that the US has had significantly faster declines in mortality from these two diseases than comparison countries. We conclude that the low longevity ranking of the United States is not likely to be a result of a poorly functioning health care system.Publication Estimating Smoking-attributable Mortality in the United States(2011-02-25) Fenelon, Andrew; Preston, Samuel H.Tobacco is the largest single cause of premature death in the developed world. Two methods of estimating the number of deaths attributable to smoking use mortality from lung cancer as an indicator of the damage from smoking. We reestimate the coefficients of one of these, the Preston/Glei/Wilmoth model, using recent data from U.S. states. We calculate smoking attributable fractions for the 50 states and the U.S. as a whole in 2000 and 2004. We estimate that 21% of adult deaths among men and 17% among women were attributable to smoking in 2004. Across states, attributable fractions range from 11% to 30% among men and from 7% to 23% among women. Smoking related mortality also explains as much as 60% of the mortality disadvantage of Southern states. At the national level, our estimates are in close agreement with those of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Preston/Glei/Wilmoth, particularly for men. But we find greater variability by state than does CDC. We suggest that our coefficients are suitable for calculating smoking-attributable mortality in contexts with relatively mature cigarette smoking epidemics.Publication The US Health Care System and Lagging Life Expectancy: A Case Study(2009-03-25) Preston, Samuel; Ho, Jessica Y.Life expectancy in the United States fares poorly in international comparisons. Its low ranking is often blamed on a poor performance by the health care system rather than on behavioral factors. This paper compares mortality trends from prostate cancer in the United States to those in other developed countries. Prostate cancer is chosen because it can be detected at an early stage, because effective treatments are available, and because it is less heavily influenced by behavioral factors than most other chronic diseases. We find that, after the introduction of the PSA screening test for prostate cancer, mortality from the disease declined significantly faster in the United States than in the set of comparison countries. Trends in incidence and survival rates support the interpretation that the US health care system has worked very effectively to reduce mortality from this important disease. A brief consideration of breast cancer suggests that similar processes may have been at work among women.Publication Lifetime Probability of Developing Diabetes in the United States(2014-08-28) Preston, Samuel; Fishman, Ezra; Stokes, AndrewPublication Sex Mortality Differentials in the United States: The Role of Cohort Smoking Patterns(2005-02-01) Preston, Samuel; Wang, HaidongThis paper demonstrates that, over the period 1948-2003, sex differentials in mortality in the age range 50-54 to 85+ widened and then narrowed on a cohort rather than on a period basis. The cohort with the maximum excess of male mortality was born shortly after the turn of the century. Three independent sources suggest that the turnaround in sex mortality differentials is consistent with sex differences in cigarette smoking by cohort. An age/period/cohort model reveals a highly significant effect of smoking histories on men’s and women’s mortality. This model suggests that improvements in mortality at older ages are likely to accelerate in the future.Publication Childhood Conditions that Predict Survival to Advanced Ages Among African Americans(1997) Preston, Samuel H.; Hill, Mark E.; Drevenstedt, Greg LeeThis paper investigates the social and economic circumstances of childhood that predict the probability of survival to age 85. It uses a unique study design in which survivors are linked to their records in U.S. Censuses of 1900 and 1910. A control group of age and race-matched children is drawn from Public Use Samples for these censuses. It concludes that the factors most predictive of survival are farm background, having literate parents, and living in a two-parent household. Results support the interpretation that death risks are positively correlated over the life cycle.Publication Mortality of American Troops in Iraq(2006-08-26) Preston, Samuel H.; Buzzell, EmilyCounts of military deaths in Iraq are well publicized, but deaths alone do not indicate the risk for an individual. In order to assess the extent of individual risk, the number of deaths must be compared to the number of individuals exposed to the risk of death. These risks may vary from person to person depending on such factors as one’s branch of service, rank, age, sex, race and ethnicity. In this paper, we construct death rates for members of the military who have been deployed to Iraq. Two excellent and highly consistent websites, one of them maintained by the Department of Defense, provide data on deaths that have been incurred in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Data on the number and characteristics of troops deployed in Iraq (the denominators of death rates) were provided by the Department of Defense on their website, with supplementary tabulations supplied by the Defense Manpower Data Center (2006). [1]. The data permit an examination of how death risks among members of the military deployed to Iraq vary according to certain personal characteristics and aspects of armed service. Some of these differences mimic those in society at large, while others reflect the unique conditions of military service.Publication Are Educational Differentials in Mortality Increasing in the United States?(1994-08-01) Preston, Samuel H.; Elo, Irma T.Because of the value that individuals place on health and longevity, levels of mortality are among the most central indicators of social and economic well-being. Analysts are concerned not only with the average level of mortality but also with its distribution among social groups, which is a fundamental indicator of social inequality. The principal dimension on which these assessments are now made in the United States is educational attainment. The decisive shift from occupational groups, the classic dimension used by the Registrar-General of England and Wales, to educational groups as the basis for assessment occurred with the publication of Kitagawa and Hauser's (1973) major study of American mortality differentials in 1960. Educational attainment has two main advantages relative to occupation and income, the other common indicators of social stratification. It is available for people who are not in the labor force; and its value is less influenced by health problems that develop in adulthood. Since health problems can lead to both high mortality and low income, comparisons of death rates of different income groups, for example, are biased by their mutual dependence on a third variable, the extent of ill health. For these reasons, educational attainment has become the principal social variable used in epidemiology as well as in demography (Liberatos et al. 1988).