Does Health Mediate Mortality in Families?

James C. Riley, Indiana University

For more than a century demographers exploring the degree to which parental survival predicts child survival have regularly found that children inherit the life spans of their parents only to a limited degree. Yet similarities in the environmental backgrounds of parents and children and shared genetic material suggest that the association should be stronger. One possible explanation for the failure of parent-child pairs to show the expected strong association is that the mortality association is mediated by health. The study population consists of males under observation for their health experience during adulthood with up to four generations in the same family. This will be a preliminary research report, which will try out some possible ways to look for shared health experience within families and between parents and their children. Strong associations will suggest that either, or both, environmental or genetic factors played a role.