Demographic tendencies, modeling of population health and description of population ageing in terms of reliability theory

It can be difficult to provide unbiased assessment of demographic trends in large most populated countries because of the technological problems and political influences. Nevertheless, without understanding those unbiased tendencies it is impossible to assess and plan socio-economic activities of a state and its individual departments. It is important particularly for medical services strategic planning in which connection fundamental significance is attached to trends especially in pediatric population. According to the reports of the Federal State Statistics Service and of the Ministry of Health Care nowadays we see in Russia relatively favorable demographic tendencies together with steady growth of morbidity in population. These trends are differently directed in different regions and they are mostly inauspicious in rural sparsely populated areas of the northern European part of Russia, in the Urals, in Siberia and in the Far East where genetically deter-mined disorders are among factors that influence the quality of population. Deterioration in quality of growing population inevitably leads to increased costs of medical service. In order to plan medical services we need prognostic models with “population health status” used as dependent variable. In order to minimize the subjectivity while assessing the health status it can be described in terms of reliability theory particularly using the Gini index (1912), which is well known as a tool for risk assessment in mechanics and macroeconomics. In reliability theory. According to the fundamentals of the reliability theory systems are classified into deteriorating or improving, which respectively are defined as systems with increasing and decreasing Rate of OCcurrence Of Failures (ROCOF) or which is even more important for understanding of medical essence - respectively with short or long mean-time-between-failures. This interpretation corresponds to concepts of population morbidity and population ageing/rejuvenation. A Gini-type index (GTI) was introduced which needs one year data of mortality in age cohorts to reveal whether the population is ageing or rejuvenating. Negative values of GTI indicate rejuvenation (decreasing ROCOF), positive values indicate ageing (increasing ROCOF). The results of assessment of population ageing in Russia in 1959 an 2010 are presented. To calculate the GTI the database of Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (Rostock, Germany) and University of California (Berkeley, USA) was used.

demography, morbidity, population health, modeling, population ageing, reliability theory, Gini-index