Regularities in human mortality after age 105.

Jesús-Adrián Alvarez,Carlo Giovanni Camarda,Francisco Villavicencio,Cosmo Strozza,Bernardo Lanza Queiroz

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0253940

Abstract

Empirical research on human mortality and extreme longevity suggests that the risk of death among the oldest-old ceases to increase and levels off at age 110. The universality of this finding remains in dispute because of two main reasons: i) high uncertainty around statistical estimates generated from scarce data, and ii) the lack of country-specific comparisons. In this article, we estimate age patterns of mortality above age 105 using data from the International Database on Longevity, an exceptionally large and recently updated database comprising more than 13,000 validated records of long-lived individuals from eight populations. We show that, in all of them, similar mortality trajectories arise, suggesting that the risk of dying levels off after age 105. As more high-quality data become available, there is more evidence in support of a levelling-off of the risk of dying as a regularity of longevous populations.

Highlights

Several regularities are associated with human mortality
While it is true that population size and observation schemes play an important role in reducing the uncertainty around mortality estimates [10], our findings provide evidence of regularities in the age pattern of mortality after age 105: none of the populations analyzed in this study indicate a rapid increase in the mortality hazard after age 105
We foresee that the inclusion of such data would have increased considerably the number of records, thereby, reducing the uncertainty in the estimates of the risk of dying in populations were confidence intervals are large

Summary

Introduction

Several regularities are associated with human mortality. It is broadly accepted, for instance, that the risk of death starts growing exponentially with age at early adulthood [1]. The trajectory of the risk of dying at extreme old ages is one of the demographic patterns that is most often questioned in evolutionary theories of aging [2,3,4,5,6] mathematical models [7,8,9] and empirical studies [10,11,12,13,14]. We examine an unprecedentedly large and reliable dataset of the longest-lived individuals to evaluate whether a universal pattern of human longevity emerges at extreme old ages, thereby, providing new insights into and a better understanding of the biological mechanisms of human aging

Methods

Results

Conclusion