CENTENARIANS:
Saturday, May 10, 2008; Click to go directly to the
OFFICIAL GRG TABLES ON SUPERCENTENARIANS
We currently have 76 Validated Living Supercentenarians on the GRG List
(65 Females:11 Males)
There were
to the Centenarian Section of our website.
[For reference, the count was 2,553 on February 12, 2002;
The count
exceeded 100,000 for the first time on March 2, 2007 and
exceeded 150,000 for the first time on April 11, 2008.]
Click on the numeric icon above for more details.
January 1, 2008; Click for Supercentenarian photographs by Mark Story Living in Three Centuries: The Face of Age.
March 20, 2008; More photos can be found at Live Long: Feats of Longevity and Aging.
Actuarial Publications from the US Social Security Administration... Period Life Tables for Males and Females as of July 9, 2007.
March 19, 2008; Here are six charts prepared by Donald B. Gennery on March 11th and March 14th. During the last week there has been considerable dispute by GRG members in our Discussion Group as to why three consecutive points fall below the Linear Regression Line in the fourth chart. The primary mathematical interpretation says that these points being below the line is simply "due to chance." This explanation can not be ruled out because there is not sufficient statistical power in such a small population to claim otherwise; but the interpretation that there is some real, underlying genetically-based pathology (what has been called a fuzzy barrier that could explain it) is still worth being pursued. It may actually be a real phenomenon, but it might not. If so, there could be a peculiar genetic predisposition to kill off Supercentenarians starting at age 114 and ending at age 117 such that we should look for it in their DNA sequence (for example, a SNP in the TTR-gene that causes amyloidosis or telomere shortening leading to Uusual Interstitial Pneumonia) vs. those who escape through to age 119 (three persons so far) as a control group. But this hypothesis has no consensus yet. More will be posted about this debate later on as time goes on. - - Steve Coles
May 25, 2007; An important statistical question about the demography of Supercentenarians is whether their net numbers are increasing exponentially over time (synchronized, say, with the observed rise in the numbers of centenarians) or whether their numbers have remained relatively flat (with a small positive linear slope). Now, Mr. Robert Young, GRG Senior Claims Investigator of Atlanta, GA, and Miguel Quesada have graphed the numbers of Supercentenarians over the last 25 years between [1980 and 2006] to reveal the presence of any obvious trends above. They conclude: "We observe a steady rise from [1980 to 2000] followed by a modest leveling off since the turn of the century. However, missing cases, which are discovered subsequently, can bias these trends. Given that most of the missing cases are from 2000 onward, we speculate that the rise is continuing, albeit at a slower rate. However, we see that, theoretically, Table E, on this website, could easily have been over 100 cases if we could only validate every potential case at the same time. Yet, we notice that the greatest age -- 114 -- remains the same. Thus, we can conclude that most of the missing cases are for age range [110 - 111] yo."
See our News Section for the newest World's Oldest Living Person, 116 year old
Sra. Maria Esther Capovilla of Guayaquil, Western ECUADOR who is now 116 years
old and has been validated by the GRG and Guinness Book of World Records.
August 27, 2006; We are sad to report that Maria passed away at 3:00 AM this morning due to
pneumonia. More details later.
Click for the latest US and World Population Clocks from the Department of the Census (POPClocks). This data is frequently useful as a denominator in many demographic ratios.
Click on the cover of the November 2005 issue of National Geographic (on the news
stands now), Vol. 208, No. 5, pp. 2-27, for more details. Then, you can join their
Discussion Board to provide your own
comments on the links between lifestyle, genes, and longevity...
Here's an Abstract: What if I told you I could add up to ten years to your healthy lifespan? A long
healthy life is no accident. It begins with good genes, but it also depends on good habits. If you
adopt the right lifestyle, experts say, chances are you may live up to a decade longer. So what's
the formula for success? In recent years researchers have fanned out across the globe to find the
secrets to long life. Funded in part by the U.S. National Institute on Aging [part of NIH],
scientists have focused on several regions where people live significantly longer: (1) In Sardinia,
ITALY, one team of demographers found a hot spot of longevity in mountain villages where men
reach age 100 at an unusual rate; (2) On the islands of Okinawa, JAPAN, another team examined
a group that is among the longest lived on Earth; and (3) in Loma Linda, CA, researchers studied
a group of Seventh-Day Adventists who rank among America's longevity "all-stars."
Residents of these three places produce a high rate of centenarians, suffer a fraction of the
diseases that commonly kill people in other parts of the developed world, and enjoy more healthy
years of life. In sum, they offer three sets of "best practices" to emulate. The rest is up to
you.
See also,
1. Jason Wilson, "How To Live Forever: Is the secret To Be Found among the Centenarians in an
Isolated Region of Sardinia?,"
The Smart Set (August 6, 2007) and
2. Dan Buettner, The Blue Zone: Lessons from
the People Who've Lived the Longest (National Geographic, Washington, D.C.;
2008).
"New data indicates that average human life expectancy is likely to reach 100 by the
year 2060."
Discover Magazine, pp. 67-8 (January 2003).
Debra Goldschmidt, CNN Medical Unit, "Study: Aging Well Runs in Families,"
CNN (November 18, 2002).
Dr. Dellara Terry, Director of the Genetics of Longevity Study at Boston University Medical
Center, said "Children of persons who have reached 100 years of age are less likely to have
cardiovascular and other chronic diseases." She examined 177 children, one of whose parents
was a centenarian, and who were living independently into their 90's.
Jeff Israely, "Letter from Sardinia (Italy): Something in the Air: How do the Inhabitants of
This Small Sardinian Town (Orroli) Manage to Live So Long?",
Time Europe (December 9, 2002).
Prof. Luca Deiana, a Researcher at the University of Sassari in Northwest Sardinia, said that he
believes that "his island has the world's highest documented percentage of people who have
passed the 100-year threshold." Part of his support comes from Duke University. They are
focusing on the genetics of the "Y" Chromosome, since "the gender ratio of female:male
centenarians in Sardinia is more like 1:1 as compared with the more typical ratio of 4:1 in the rest
of the world.
[ Editor's Note: The Time article got Mr. Giovanni Frau's ranking wrong; he is
only 20th, not 3rd in the world.]
Two University Professors Form a Wager on "The Maximum Human Life Span" 150 Years from Now
Click for more details.
Video Tape Interviews with Centenarians are now available for purchase.
Click for a photo gallery of Noted Nonagenarians and Centenarians which is updated regularly.
Click for another photo gallery of Supercentenarians carefully organized by age and maintained by Mr. Robert Young of Atlanta, Georgia, our GRG Senior Claims Investigator.
Numbers of US Centenarians are expected to rise exponentially between now and 2050.
April 11, 2008; The latest Census projection, made in 2003 calls for a US centenarian
population of 1.1 million in 2050. That's up from a projection made a few years earlier of
834,000.
Ref.: "Living to 100 May Be Easier Than Counting Those Who've Made It," The
Wall Street Journal, p. B1 (April 11, 2008).
February 7, 2008;
Assuming that there are 300 million U.S. Citizens, the chances of someone becoming a
centenarian is 1:4 thousand (~80,000 US centenarians today); on the other hand, the chances of
someone becoming a
Supercentenarian is only 1:4 million.
Three orders of magnitude is a big difference!
What is the relative importance of Genetic Inheritance vs. Life Style?
Were there Centenarians in Ancient Times?
Click for a table of 39 famous classical Greek Philosophers and Statesmen who are known to have survived past the age of 70, at least some of whom did go on to become Centenarians. Therefore, I would speculate that the density of Centenarians per capita may well have been the same in (civilized) ancient times as it is today. It's just that there has never been any good documentation for ordinary people who were not already famous for some reason or another, so all the demographics are biased in favor of wealthy or powerful individuals rather than the ordinary person. Grmek and Gourevitch speculate that during the Classical Greek Period, anyone who made it past the age of 5 years -- surviving all the common childhood illness of that day -- had a reasonable chance of living to a ripe old age. [Life expectancy at 400 B.C. was estimated to be around 30 years of age.] One demographer of ancient civilizations reported that Greek men lived to 45 years (based on a sample size of 91), while women lived to 36.2 years (based on a sample size of 55). Curiously, the gender statistics are inverted compared to today, since child-birth was a much more traumatic experience at that time than now, and it certainly skewed female statistics downward. Also recall that it was common for average citizens to take great care in their hygiene (sanitation), Mediterranean diet (fish, figs, olive oil, wine, etc.), and exercise program (sports/gymnasium), although I suspect that there was a lot more male trauma per capita than today and that biased the statistics for men downward. [Ref. Mirko Grmek and Danielle Gourevitch, Illness in Antiquity (Fayard; 1998).]
The "bottom line" is that there is no reason to believe that there couldn't have been a lot of men/women in a population of 2,500 years ago who were Centenarians, even if they weren't commonplace. [Source for Table: Olivier Postel-Vinay, "Histoire Le Cas de la Grece Antique," La Recherche Special -- Vivre 120 Ans, Vol. 322, p. 90 (Paris; July-August 1999). Note: La Recherche is the French equivalent of Scientific American in the English-speaking world.]
A 1995 Monograph on Exceptional Longevity: From Prehistory to the Present, Vol. 2,
Edited by Bernard Jeune, M.D. and James W. Vaupel, Ph.D. in the Odense University Press
Series on Population Aging is an excellent source for more details and is now available
free of charge on the Internet. Click on the book cover above... The general series of
Odense Monographs on Population Aging,
(Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany; 1995) is an excellent
resource for the field.
Other historical sources for claims of extreme longevity can be found in the following
two books:
1. James Easton, Human Longevity: Recording of Name, Age, Place of Residence, and Year
of the Decease of 1712 Persons Who Attained a Century and Upwards from AD 66 to 1799,
Comprising a Period of 1733 Years with Anecdotes of the Most Remarkable (London; UK;
1799).
Easton collected 427 anecdotes of venerable centenarians throughout human history from Roman
to modern times in an uncritical manner. Most of these will not pass muster as rigorous
verification methodologies were never in place in those years and they follow in the mythological
traditions of high-altitude Shangri-La villages like Vilcabamba, ECUADOR, The Hunza, INDIA,
and The Caucasus, RUSSIA, all of which have been discredited.
2. William J. Thoms, The Longevity of Man, Its Facts and Its Fictions (J. Murray,
London; UK; 1873).
Thoms, the Deputy Librarian for The House of Lords, focused on royalty and
aristocracy, whose births and deaths were recorded long before birth registration became
universal in the 19th-Century. Sadly, Thoms did not find a single instance of a Peer, Duke, or
Baron who lived to be a centenarian.
The Huffington Center on Aging at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston is another interesting source for information about Centenarians.
As reported on the font cover of USA Today (August 24, 1999), The U.S. Census Bureau forecasts that the number of Americans age 100 or older will increase by more than 22 times the 1990 estimate of 37,306. In October 2001, the US Census Bureau actually reported that there were 50,454 US Centenarians (a more reasonable 35 percent increase) out of a total population of 281.4 million Americans. But by 2050, "the number of US centenarians is expected to reach 834,000 and maybe even 1 million," said Dr. Robert Butler, President of the International Longevity Center in New York City.
From present data, the number of worldwide Centenarians is around 450,000. However, if one considers only the total number of Supercentenarians (by definition, persons surviving to >= 110 years) this number falls dramatically to around 30 worldwide (See details below). To our knowledge, there are no living persons older than 120; despite the fact that there are a large number of pretenders from foreign countries, these claimants have never been rigorously validated by means of the sort of documentation that would be sufficient to prove their claim (Birth Certificates, Baptismal Certificates, Marriage Certificates, and so forth). But also, recall that the art of "record keeping" was never rigorous before the age of data processing. Persons born at home in rural areas were frequently lucky if they had a family Bible to record the event let alone the correct spelling of the parents names, their ages at the time, etc.
Other highlights form the 2000 Census Report include the following:
1. The
most populous state in the nation, California, has the largest number of centenarian residents,
5,341 or 0.016 percent of its population;
2. The state with the largest percentage of centenarians is South Dakota, where 0.0033 percent
of residents were 100 or over. South Dakota was followed by Iowa and the District of Columbia;
3. Of the five-year age groups, the [50-to-54] category had the largest increase, up 55 percent to
17.6 million, thanks to the "Baby Boomers";
4. While women still outnumber men at older ages, the gender ratio in the [65-and-over]
category
increased from 67 men per 100 women in 1990 to 70 men per 100 women in 2000.
An excellent book covering the topic of Centenarians is
Lynn Peters Adler,
Centenarians: The Bonus Years (Health Press; Santa Fe, New Mexico; 1997).
Lynn
maintains a website at the National
Centenarian
Awareness Project at 3135 East Marshall Avenue; Phoenix, AZ 85016.
November 10, 2005; Another interesting photographic book devoted to Supercentenarians is Jerry Friedman's book Earth's Elders: The Wisdom of the World's Oldest People ( ISBN: 0976910802; 215 pages; Earths Elders Foundation; 2005; $19.77 on Amazon.com).
Supercentenarian Ann Pouder [April 8, 1807 - July 10, 1917] photographed on her
110th birthday.
Click to continue to centenarian file No. 1 of 6 for photographs of the World's Oldest Women...
Click to continue to centenarian file No. 2 of 6 for more photographs of the World's Oldest Women...
Click to continue to centenarian file No. 3 of 6 for more photographs of the World's Oldest Women...
Click to continue to centenarian file No. 4 of 6 for more photographs of the World's Oldest Women...
Click to continue to centenarian file No. 5 of 6 for more photographs of the World's Oldest Women...
Click to continue to centenarian file No. 6 of 6 for more photographs of the World's Oldest Women...
Click to continue to centenarian file No. 1 of 1 for photographs of the World's Oldest Men...
Click to continue to centenarian file No. 1 of 1 for Incomplete or Fraudulent Cases.
Click for a Roster of the Longest Living Persons in the State of Nebraska maintained by Mr. E. A. Kral, a GRG Correspondent from Wilber, NE.