gwern comments on Living Forever is Hard, or, The Gompertz Curve - Less Wrong

46 Post author: gwern 17 May 2011 09:08PM

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Comment author: gwern 19 July 2011 05:17:31PM 9 points [-]

"Last month, a 114-year-old former schoolteacher from Georgia named Besse Cooper became the world's oldest living person. Her predecessor, Brazil's Maria Gomes Valentim, was 114 when she died. So was the oldest living person before her, and the one before her. In fact, eight of the last nine "world's oldest" titleholders were 114 when they achieved the distinction. Here's the morbid part: All but two were still 114 when they passed it on. Those two? They died at 115.

The celebration surrounding Cooper when she assumed the title, then, might as well have been accompanied by condolences. If historical trends hold, she will likely be dead within a year.

It's no surprise that it's hard to stay the "world's oldest" for very long. These people are, after all, really old. What's surprising is just how consistent the numbers have been. Just seven people whose ages could be fully verified by the Gerontology Research Group have ever made it past 115. Only two of those seven lived to see the 21st century. The longest-living person ever, a French woman named Jeanne Calment, died at age 122 in August 1997; no one since 2000 has come within five years of matching her longevity.

...In the past few years, the global count of supercentenarians—people 110 and older—has leveled off at about 80. And the maximum age hasn't budged. Robert Young, senior gerontology consultant for the Guinness Book of World Records, says, "The more people are turning 110, the more people are dying at 110."

Young calls this the "rectangularization of the mortality curve." To illustrate it, he points to Japan, which in 1990 had 3,000 people aged 100 and over, with the oldest being 114. Twenty years later, Japan has an estimated 44,000 people over the age of 100—and the oldest is still 114. For reasons that aren't entirely clear, Young says, the odds of a person dying in any given year between the ages of 110 and 113 appear to be about one in two. But by age 114, the chances jump to more like two in three."

--Slate, "The World's Deadliest Distinction: Why aren't the oldest living people getting any older?"

Comment author: gwern 19 September 2013 03:35:11PM 2 points [-]

"The World’s Oldest Person Is getting Younger":

The two oldest men in the world died recently. Jiroemon Kimura, a 116-year-old, died in June in Japan after becoming the oldest man yet recorded. His successor Salustiano Sanchez, aged 112 and born in Spain, died last week in New York State. That leaves just two men in the world known to be over 110, compared with 58 women (19 of whom are Japanese, 20 American). By contrast there are now half a million people over 100, and the number is growing at 7 percent a year.

For all the continuing improvements in average life expectancy, the maximum age of human beings seems to be stuck. It’s still very difficult even for women to get to 110 and the number of people who reach 115 seems if anything to be falling. According to Professor Stephen Coles, of the Gerontology Research Group at University of California, Los Angeles, your probability of dying each year shoots up to 50 percent once you reach 110 and 70 percent at 115.

Female “supercentenarians” — as 110-plus people are called — are a long way off breaking the record for long life. The record, 122, was set by Jeanne-Louise Calment in 1997, and the oldest living person in the world, Misao Okawa, 115 years and 199 days as of today, would have to live another seven years to overtake that: meaning Ms Calment’s record will stand for at least 23 years. Ms Okawa is the only person over 115 alive today, whereas in 1997 there were four.

... The lack of any increase in people living past 110 is surprising. Demographers are so used to rising average longevity all that they might expect to see more of us pushing the boundaries of extreme old age as well. Instead there is an enormous increase in 100-year-olds and not much change in 110-year-olds.

... All those people who eat wheat germ or special yoghurt or vitamin supplements in the hope of living forever are probably wasting their time. So too are those who practice “caloric restriction” on the grounds that mice live much longer if nearly starved. Such gaunt folk might get to 100 instead of 90, but they are not going to get to 120 by such means.

To get an idea of just how extraordinary an outlier Calment was, see my graphing of the GRG oldest-person dataset.

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