Effect of marital status on death rates. Part 1: High accuracy exploration of the Farr-Bertillon effect

摘要

The Farr-Bertillon law says that for all age-groups the death rate of marriedpeople is lower than the death rate of people who are not married (i.e. single,widowed or divorced). Although this law has been known for over 150 years, ithas never been established with great accuracy. This even let some authorsargue that it was a statistical artefact. It is true that the data must beselected and analyzed with great care, especially for age groups of small sizesuch as widowers under 25. The observations reported in this paper wereselected and designed in the same way as experiments in physics, that is to saywith the objective of minimizing the error bars for all age-groups. It will beseen that data appropriate for mid-age groups may be unsuitable for young agegroups and vice versa. The investigation led to the following results. (1) TheFB effect is basically the same for men and women, except that on average it isabout 20\% stronger for men. (2) There is a marked difference between single ordivorced persons on the one hand, for whom the effect is largest around the ageof 45, and widowed persons on the other hand, for whom the effect is largestaround the age of 25. (3) When different causes of death are distinguished, theeffect is largest for suicide and smallest for cancer. (4) For young widowersthe death rates are up to 10 times higher than for married persons of same age.This extreme form of the FB effect will be referred to as the "young widowereffect." A possible connection between the FB effect and Martin Raff's "Stayalive" effect for cells in an organism is discussed in the last section.