Once seen as unthinkable or rare, the prospect of celebrating one’s hundredth birthday is now becoming more and more real for many people. Some even brilliantly cross the 105 or 110 year mark. As explained by INED (National Institute of Demographic Studies) in a recent study published this Wednesday, “until the middle of the 20th century, there were probably few humans over 100 years old”. A life expectancy weaker at the time, which is largely explained by a very strong infant mortality and high risks of death throughout life. Indeed, the number of centenarians since the end of the Second World War has increased considerably, underlines INED. If in 1970 France had more than 1,000 centenarians, in the year 2000 there were more than 8,000 and more than 31,000 on January 1, 2024.
A new study carried out by INED (National Institute of Demographic Studies) and published in review Population & Society, highlighted the emergence of a new age group called supercentenarians.
Supercentenarians: a very large majority of women
Does the term supercentenary mean nothing to you? It refers to centenarians who reach the age of 110. “If exceeding this age remains a rare event, its frequency has increased significantly in recent decades” can we read in the study. Indeed, the number of supercentenarians amounts to less than 0.15% compared to the more than 600,000 deaths observed each year in France. But this percentage is actually “a spectacular explosion” according to INED, because it was limited to a few units until the end of the 1980s.
This phenomenon goes hand in hand with the increase in life expectancy over the decades. In fact, this is 85.7 years for women and 80 years for men. As the study indicates,“in 2022, 39 people will have died aged 110 or over – with an overwhelming majority of women, 38 out of 39”. Likewise, the majority of people who died at age 105 were women (843 women and 81 men in 2020, or 10 times more women than men). But then, how can we explain this difference in life expectancy between men and women? “This impressive ratio is entirely due to excess male mortality, which prevails throughout life, particularly at working ages, and which further reduces the number of male generations compared to their female counterparts” explains INED. According to INSEE, this increase in the number of supercentenarians could continue in the coming years, because the national statistics institute predicts more “of 200,000 centenarians in 2070 if current mortality trends remained the same.
8 times more supercentenarians in Guadeloupe and Martinique
As INED points out in the study, the number of supercentenarians in mainland France varies considerably from one department to another, oscillating between 0 and 17 per million inhabitants. However, a striking demographic feature quickly caught the attention of researchers as they examined the number of supercentenarian deaths since 1978. Indeed, they noticed that there were 8 times more people over 110 years old in Guadeloupe and Martinique than in any department of mainland France. According to INED, the number of supercentenarians in Guadeloupe and Martinique is respectively 44 and 36 per million inhabitants.
According to a hypothesis given by Inded, this could be explained by a “specificity of the population of these islands, essentially made up of descendants of slaves who suffered the slave trade, including the very deadly crossing of the Atlantic”. The extreme conditions suffered by their ancestors may have led to “a most robust selection and, in doing so, perhaps that of genes of the longevity“.
Source :
- Living beyond 105: when the improbable becomes reality – INED study
