New ideas, techniques and problems in modelling demographic and epidemiological manifestation of ageing

Traditional demographic techniques of morbidity and mortality analysis in human and animal populations do not pay attention to the two important properties related to the interaction between the population and its environment. The first one is concerned with differing the chances for individuals to fall sick and to die. The second deals with the dependencies between the vitally important biologic characteristics (life span, the age of illness onset, etc.) of genetic relatives as well as of individuals sharing similar cultural and other living standards. The paper discusses the approaches to ageing and survival modeling where these properties are reflected in population dynamics. It also formulates several unsolved problems related to modeling and control under incomplete information. Finally, it discusses some promising biological hypotheses that can be studied with the help of novel models.