Time-to-death patterns in markers of age and dependency

We aim to determine the extent to which variables commonly used to describe health, well-being, and disability in old age vary primarily as a function of years lived (chronological age), years left (thanatological age), or as a function of both. We analyze data from the U.S. Health and Retirement Study to estimate chronological age and time-to-death patterns in 78 such variables.We describe results for the birth cohort 1915-1919 in the final 12 years of life. Our results show that most of the markers used to study well-being in old age vary along both the age and the timeto- death dimensions, but that some markers are exclusively a function of either time to death or chronological age, while other markers display different patterns in men and women.