Mortality rate of the crush victims in the Marmara earthquake of August 1999 was compared with the conclusions arrived after making thermodynamic assessment of the data acquired in the previous earthquakes. Entropic age concept was found very helpful while assessing the data. Mortality rate in the age group of 0-9 years old crush victims was 0 because the basal metabolic rate (BMR) of these children was low. The earthquake happened at 3:03 a.m. in the morning and it was probably at the coldest time of the day; therefore, the victims were losing sufficient heat to avoid hyperpraxia, where body temperature reaches to 40°C or above. As the population and the age of the victims increase more people died and the survival rate decreased. The highest mortality rate was in the 60+ age group. According to the entropic age concept, these group of victims had already accumulated a lot of entropy (e.g., heath problems) in their bodies in previous stages of their lives; therefore, they were more prone to death.

The present study was carried out to estimate lamb survival (in days) from birth to weaning under survival analysis using data records from 2057 Harnali lambs born to 134 sires and 623 dams between the period from 2001 to 2020. The weaning age in resourced population was 90 days from birth. The hazard ratio in terms of risk of death up to weaning was determined using Cox proportional hazards model by subjecting some fixed factors such as year of birth, sex of lamb, birth weight (kg), dam’s weight at lambing (kg) and dam’s age at lambing (years). The overall survivability up to weaning among lambs was 91.59% and Kaplan–Meier estimates of mean survival time up to weaning was 85.77 days. Cox proportional hazard modelling revealed that the hazards of death up to weaning was higher in male lambs [1.66, 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.22–2.26] compared with female lambs [hazard ratio (HR) = 1.00]. It was also observed that the hazards of death (HR = 0.91, 95% CI: 0.88–0.94) had decreasing trends over years. For birth weight (kg), hazard rate was 0.34 (95% CI: 0.25–0.46), which indicated that the risk of pre-weaning mortality was lower as birth weight increases. The weight and age of dams at lambing did not influence the survival time of studied population. The present findings indicated that survival time increased in studied lambs over the years and it could be increased more by giving more emphasis on better litter weight and general health aspects at farm level.

Background: Despite the magnitude of dementia, little research on survival duration and prognosis of dementia has been reported in developing countries. This study was conducted to investigate survival times, identify related prognostic factors and construct a prognostic index (PI) for community-based dementia patients in Beijing, China.

Methods: This study is part of the 10/66 Dementia Research Group study in China. One hundred and thirty-seven dementia patients identified by 10/66 dementia criteria among 2162 participants and 137 referent subjects matched by age and sex were followed up for five years.

Results: Ninety-one (66.4%) dementia patients and 51 (37.2%) referent subjects died during the 5-year follow-up (p < 0.01). The median survival time of dementia patients was 4.2 years (95% CI: 3.8–4.6). Severity of dementia (severe/mild, HR: 8.765, 95% CI: 4.436–17.163), substantial disability (HR: 5.503, 95% CI: 3.017–8.135), co-morbidity (HR: 4.149, 95% CI: 2.254–7.736) and age (HR: 1.079, 95% CI: 1.048–1.110) were independent predictors of survival for patients with dementia. Using the PI calculated for each dementia patient, all dementia patients were classified into three groups: low, medium and high risk groups. The median survival times of each group were 5.2 years, 4.4 years and 1.5 years (p < 0.01), respectively.

Conclusions: Survival times of community-based dementia patients were significantly shorter than those of referent subjects. Severity of dementia, substantial disability, co-morbidity and age were independent predictors of survival. The PI derived from the four predictors can stratify the mortality risk and predict life expectancy for community-dwelled dementia patients, although further validation is needed.

Bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIA) is an easy-to-use, non-invasive and reproducible technique to evaluate changes in body composition and nutritional status. Phase angle, determined by BIA, has been found to be a prognostic indicator in several chronic conditions, such as HIV, liver cirrhosis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and lung cancer, and in patients undergoing dialysis. The present study investigated the prognostic role of phase angle in advanced pancreatic cancer. We evaluated a case series of fifty-eight stage IV pancreatic cancer patients treated at Cancer Treatment Centers of America® at Midwestern Regional Medical Center (Zion, IL, USA) between January 2000 and July 2003. BIA was conducted on all patients using a bioelectrical impedance analyser that operated at 50kHz. The phase angle was calculated as capacitance (Xc)/resistance (R) and expressed in degrees. The Kaplan–Meier method was used to calculate survival. Cox proportional hazard models were constructed to evaluate the prognostic effect of phase angle independent of other clinical and nutritional variables. The correlations between phase angle and traditional nutritional measures were evaluated using Pearson and Spearman coefficients. Patients with phase angle <5·0° had a median survival time of 6·3 (95% CI 3·5, 9·2) months (n 29), while those with phase angle >5·0° had a median survival time of 10·2 (95% CI 9·6, 10·8) months (n 29); this difference was statistically significant (P=0·02). The present study demonstrates that phase angle is a strong prognostic indicator in advanced pancreatic cancer. Similar studies in other cancer settings with larger sample sizes are needed to further validate the prognostic significance of the phase angle.

Aging, of biological and mechanical systems, is well described as ‘deterioration of the power to withstand destruction.’ The failure-rate concept is the mathematical way of describing aging. Failure rates have been defined for discrete and continuous time and used extensively, particularly in actuarial science and reliability. This paper assumes an arbitrary scale on which an object encounters stress, and develops a theory of failure rate with respect to ‘stress-time’ in analogy with the discrete- and continuous-time cases.