Maier / Gampe / Jeune Supercentenarians

2010
ISBN: 978-3-642-11520-2
Verlag: Springer
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: Wasserzeichen (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 323 Seiten, eBook

Reihe: Demographic Research Monographs

Does human mortality after age 110 continue to rise, level off, or start to decline? This book describes a concerted, international research effort undertaken with the goal of establishing a database that allows the best possible description of the mortality trajectory beyond the age of 110. The International Database on Longevity (IDL) is the result of this ongoing effort. The IDL contains exhaustive information on validated cases of supercentenarians (people 110 years and older) and allows unbiased estimates of mortality after age 110. The main finding is remarkable: human mortality after age 110 is flat at a probability of death of 50% per year. The sixteen chapters of this book discuss age validation of exceptional longevity, data on supercentenarians in a series of countries, structure and contents of the IDL, and statistical analysis of human mortality after age 110. Several chapters include short accounts of specific supercentenarians that add life to demographic research.

Zielgruppe

Research

Autoren/Hrsg.

Maier, Heiner

Gampe, Jutta

Jeune, Bernard

Vaupel, James W.

Robine, Jean-Marie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

General.- On the age validation of supercentenarians.- The International Database on Longevity: Structure and contents.- Country reports.- Supercentenarians in the United States.- The emergence of supercentenarians in Canada.- Supercentenarians in Japan.- Being very old in a young country: Centenarians and supercentenarians in Australia.- Supercentenarians in France.- Italian supercentenarians: Age validation of deaths from 1969 to 2000.- Emergence and verification of supercentenarians in Spain.- Age validation of persons aged 105 and above in Germany.- The growth of high ages in England and Wales, 1635-2106.- Supercentenarians in the Nordic Countries.- Research on supercentenarians.- Human mortality beyond age 110.- Is it possible to measure life expectancy at 110 in France?.- Age 115 or more in the United States: Fact or fiction?.- Jeanne Calment and her successors. Biographical notes on the longest living humans.

Leseproben

"The growth of high ages in England and Wales, 1635-2106 (p. 191-192)

A. Roger Thatcher

Former Director of the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys and Registrar General for England and Wales, 1978-86. Address for correspondence: 35 Thetford Road, New Malden, Surrey, KT3 5DP, United Kingdom. E-Mail: [e-mail]

Abstract. In England and Wales there were many historical claims of extreme longevity - ranging up to 152 years, said to have been reached in 1635 - but it is impossible to verify any of them. A modern approach suggests that it is unlikely that genuine centenarians reached the age of 100 before about 1700. Later, the number of centenarians recorded in censuses was found to be greatly exaggerated.

Much more reliable estimates of numbers of centenarians can be derived from the data on registered deaths, which provide a continuous series from 1911 to the present. Details are given of a very well-documented supercentenarian who reached the age of 110 in 1930, and also of the veri ed supercentenarian deaths since 1968.

From 1911 until the 1940s, there were only one or two hundred centenarians, but from the 1950s, the numbers started to increase rapidly. The identi ed reasons for this are summarized. The numbers have already reached an estimated 8,500. According to the official projections, if trends continue the number of centenarians may reach 486,000 in 2076, and perhaps double that number by 2106; provided, presumably, that there will be enough carers to look after so many. The highest age is expected to rise.

1 The first centenarian

As a prologue, we shall begin by mentioning what is known about the date of the rst centenarian in England and Wales, a kind of milestone which was passed before the days of modern statistics. There has always been intense public interest in reported cases of extreme longevity. Countries and areas and experts vied with each other to nd older and older cases, but the idea that extreme ages needed to be veri ed with extreme rigor was not recognized.

A celebrated example was Thomas Parr, who died in 1635 at the reported age of 152. A postmortem examination was made by William Harvey, who was famous for discovering the circulation of the blood. The case naturally attracted considerable publicity. Harvey described in detail the state of Parrs body, but did not make any attempt to check his age. Peter Laslett, the founder of the Cambridge Group for the history of population and social structures, was very critical of this claim, and, indeed, all the other reported very high ages in England and Wales. Laslett and his assistant, Julia Hynes, set out to verify, by the most rigorous methods, as many cases of high ages as they could, but they found that this was not an easy task.

Thatcher (1999a) compared some of the veri ed ages with the highest ages one might have expected to nd in theory, in historical cohorts of sizes which were known at least roughly, and with probabilities of dying which could also be estimated by using a model. The details are in the paper. The method predicted that the longest-living members of cohorts born in the medieval period were likely to have died in their nineties. There were certainly medieval people who were believed by their contemporaries to be over 90 years old, but it is difficult to validate individual cases by modern methods."