type="main" <p>The health situation in Russia has often been characterized as a long-running crisis. From the 1960s until the beginning of the 2000s, the declining life expectancy trend was substantially interrupted only twice: once in the mid-1980s as a result of Gorbachev's anti-alcohol campaign,...</p>

The well-known Oeppen-Vaupel straight line of maximum female life expectancies showed that the highest life expectancy observed in a given year increased linearly from 1840 to 2000. Their analysis fueled major controversy, especially when used to extrapolate future improvements in life...

In the most advanced countries, child mortality and adult mortality under age 65 years have fallen so low that further improvement in life expectancy relies almost completely on the decline of mortality at older ages. This phenomenon is particularly pronounced among women, who are far ahead of...

Mortality data for 30 mostly developed countries available in the Kannisto-Thatcher Database on Old-Age Mortality (KTDB) are drawn on to assess the pace of decline in death rates at ages 80 years and above. As of 2004 this database recorded 37 million persons at these ages, including 130,000...

Demographic transition theory might seem to imply that, after a period of exceptional population growth resulting from the time lag between mortality and fertility declines, every population, and then the whole world population will stabilize and, consequently, no more acute population problems...