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How long can humans live? This open access book documents, verifies and brings to life the advance of the frontier of human survival. It carefully validates data on supercentenarians, aged 110+, and semi-supercentenarians, aged 105-109, stored in the International Database on Longevity (IDL). The chapters in this book contribute substantial advances in rigorously checked facts about exceptional lifespans and in the application of state-of-the-art analytical strategies to understand trends and patterns in these rare lifespans. The book includes detailed accounts of extreme long-livers and how their long lifespans were documented, as well as reports on the causes of death at the oldest ages. Its key finding, based on the analysis of 1,219 validated supercentenarians, is that the annual probability of death is constant at 50% after age 110. In contrast to previous assertions about a ceiling on the human lifespan, evidence presented in this book suggests that lifespan records in specific countries and globally will be broken again and again as more people survive to become supercentenarians. ​

Does human mortality after age 110 continue to rise, level off, or start to decline? This book describes a concerted, international research effort undertaken with the goal of establishing a database that allows the best possible description of the mortality trajectory beyond the age of 110. The International Database on Longevity (IDL) is the result of this ongoing effort. The IDL contains exhaustive information on validated cases of supercentenarians (people 110 years and older) and allows unbiased estimates of mortality after age 110. The main finding is remarkable: human mortality after age 110 is flat at a probability of death of 50% per year. The sixteen chapters of this book discuss age validation of exceptional longevity, data on supercentenarians in a series of countries, structure and contents of the IDL, and statistical analysis of human mortality after age 110. Several chapters include short accounts of specific supercentenarians that add life to demographic research.

The most widely used measure of longevity is the period life expectancy at birth which is calculated from age specific death rates by life table methods. In 2002, John Bongaarts and Griffith Feeney introduced the revolutionary idea that this conventional estimate of period life expectancy is distorted by a tempo effect whenever longevity is changing. The tempo effect is defined as an inflation or deflation of the period incidence of a demographic event resulting from a rise or fall in the mean age at which the event occurs. Some demographers agree with this radical argument; others disagree. The book reviews the debate on how best to measure period longevity. In the various chapters, leading experts in demography critically examine the existence of the tempo effect in mortality, present extensions and applications, and compare period and cohort longevity measures. The book provides a deeper understanding of and new insights into the fundamental question'How long do we live'?