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Vienna Institute of Demography (Ed.)
Vienna Yearbook of Population Research 2013
Jon Anson
S. 71 - 85 doi: 10.1553/populationyearbook2013s71
Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften
Abstract:
Human beings have always been fascinated by super-longevity and now, as mortality declines to levels never before experienced, living to be a centenarian becomes a real, though still a rather remote, possibility. In most countries of the industrialised world the modal age at death is rising constantly and the number of centenarians is growing exponentially. A growing corpus of research is focussing on the centenarians, their particularities and the verification of their centenarian status. However, if we wish to unravel the secrets for attaining this magnificent age, we need to look beyond the centenarian communities themselves. The number of people becoming centenarians is determined by three different processes: the numbers born 100 years earlier, the probability of reaching old age and the probability of surviving old age to become a centenarian. Mortality up to age 80 and mortality beyond age 80, though loosely related, need to be treated as qualitatively different phenomena. However, there have been few studies of conditions distinguishing between populations and societies with low and high mortality at old ages. Instead, most work has focussed on identifying and carefully documenting high longevity populations, those with an unusually high number of centenarians - usually small, bounded populations - while no attention has been given to their complement, high shortivity populations, those with a lack of centenarians. In the absence of a theory of population longevity and shortivity, we cannot distinguish between populations which are genuinely different from most others, and those which are merely chance outliers. The critical question is thus ‘what are the transition mechanisms’?We need to focus less on the centenarians themselves, and more on the conditions which distinguish populations with a relatively high probability of surviving from age 80 to age 100 from those with a relatively low probability of survival.
2014/04/30 10:17:41 Object Identifier:
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Introduction
Graziella Caselli and Marc Luy: Determinants of unusual and differential longevity
Refereed Articles
Elizabeth Wrigley-Field: Mortality deceleration is not informative of
unobserved heterogeneity in open groups
Shiro Horiuchi, Nadine Ouellette, Siu Lan Karen Cheung and
Jean-Marie Robine: Modal age at death: lifespan indicator in the era of
longevity extension
Jon Anson: Surviving to be the oldest old—destiny or chance?
Michel Poulain, Anne Herm and Gianni Pes: The Blue Zones: areas of exceptional longevity
around the world
Luis Rosero-Bixby, William H. Dow and David H. Rehkopf: The Nicoya region of Costa Rica: a high longevity
island for elderly males
Sebastian Klüsener and Rembrandt D. Scholz: Regional hot spots of exceptional longevity in
Germany
Richard G. Rogers, Patrick M. Krueger, Richard Miech and
Elizabeth M. Lawrence: Lifetime abstainers and mortality risk in the
United States
Maria Winkler-Dworak and Heiner Kaden: The longevity of academicians: evidence from the
Saxonian Academy of Sciences and Humanities in
Leipzig
Morgan E. Levine and Eileen M. Crimmins: Evidence of resiliency among long-lived smokers
Ethan J. Sharygin and Michel Guillot: Ethnicity, russification and excess mortality in
Kazakhstan
Graziella Caselli, Rosa Maria Lipsi, Enrica Lapucci and James W. Vaupel: Exploring Sardinian longevity: women fertility and
parental transmission of longevity
Valérie Jarry, Alain Gagnon and Robert Bourbeau: Maternal age, birth order and other early-life
factors: a family-level approach to exploring
exceptional survival
Leonid A. Gavrilov and Natalia S. Gavrilova: Determinants of exceptional human longevity:
new ideas and findings
Luisa Salaris, Nicola Tedesco and Michel Poulain: Familial transmission of human longevity:
a population-based study in an inland village of
Sardinia (Italy), 1850–2010
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