Introducing the age-profile: an index of survival.

This paper introduces the concept of the ‘age-profile’, which represents the proportions of cohort populations surviving from birth to a given year. Life tables for Australia and three-dimensional diagrams based on these data are used to illustrate the difference between the ‘age-profile’ values for a given year and the transverse survival values for the same year. The last part of the paper describes areas in which the ‘age-profile’ might be used with reference to its value in representing the experience of cohorts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]