Recent adverse mortality trends in Scotland: comparison with other high-income countries
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: Gains in life expectancy have faltered in several high-income countries in recent years. Scotland has consistently had a lower life expectancy than many other high-income countries over the past 70 years. We aim to compare life expectancy trends in Scotland to those seen internationally and to assess the timing and importance of any recent changes in mortality trends for Scotland. SETTING: Austria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, England and Wales, Estonia, France, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Israel, Japan, Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands, Northern Ireland, Poland, Scotland, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and USA. METHODS: We used life expectancy data from the Human Mortality Database (HMD) to calculate the mean annual life expectancy change for 24 high-income countries over 5-year periods from 1992 to 2016. Linear regression was used to assess the association between life expectancy in 2011 and mean life expectancy change over the subsequent 5 years. One-break and two-break segmented regression models were used to test the timing of mortality rate changes in Scotland between 1990 and 2018. RESULTS: Mean improvements in life expectancy in 2012-2016 were smallest among women (<2 weeks/year) in Northern Ireland, Iceland, England and Wales, and the USA and among men (<5 weeks/year) in Iceland, USA, England and Wales, and Scotland. Japan, Korea and countries of Eastern Europe had substantial gains in life expectancy over the same period. The best estimate of when mortality rates changed to a slower rate of improvement in Scotland was the year to 2012 quarter 4 for men and the year to 2014 quarter 2 for women. CONCLUSIONS: Life expectancy improvement has stalled across many, but not all, high-income countries. The recent change in the mortality trend in Scotland occurred within the period 2012-2014. Further research is required to understand these trends, but governments must also take timely action on plausible contributors.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it