MORTAL

The aim of MORTAL is to challenge current non-empirical narratives and produce fundamentally new knowledge about the mechanisms underlying mortality trends. The health and longevity of a population is a key barometer of general well-being, reflecting the cumulative effects of the wider social, economic and environmental conditions in which people live. Recently, demographic alarm bells have been sounded by declining life expectancy in the USA and stagnating mortality in the UK and other parts of Europe. Whether these trends are due to short-term causes such as "deaths of despair" from drugs, alcohol and suicide, or to longer-term changes in risk factors such as obesity, remains unclear, and some work in this area has lacked empirical rigor. For the first time, MORTAL will combine theory and data from several disciplines (biology, epidemiology, sociology, economics, genetics) with demographic theory on the challenging three-dimensional age-period-cohort space in which mortality trends emerge to understand the underlying drivers of population mortality. Building a model from cell to society and across age, period and cohort, MORTAL will integrate insights from disparate disciplines to answer the vital question: as populations, how long do we live, and why?