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A Cohort Comparison of Lifespan After Age 100 in Denmark and Sweden: Are Only the Oldest Getting Older?
- Source :
- Demography, Medford, A, Christensen, K, Skytthe, A & Vaupel, J W 2019, ' A Cohort Comparison of Lifespan After Age 100 in Denmark and Sweden : Are Only the Oldest Getting Older? ', Demography, vol. 56, no. 2, pp. 665-677 . https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-018-0755-7
- Publication Year :
- 2019
- Publisher :
- Duke University Press, 2019.
-
Abstract
- Although Denmark and Sweden have close cultural and historical ties, lifespans for Danes have generally been lower than those of Swedes. Recent improvements in Danish mortality after a period of stagnation have led to the suspicion that there may be positive trends at the very high ages at death within that population and that these trends could be quite different from those observed in Sweden. Although the mean ages at death for Danish and Swedish centenarians have been relatively constant at about 102 years for the cohorts born 1870–1904, the oldest-old in Denmark have been getting older, but no evidence has suggested any increase in lifespan for Swedes. Using quantile regression, we show that Danish centenarian lifespans in the 90th percentile have been lengthening, with those in 94th percentile (6 % longest-lived individuals) having a trend that is statistically significant at the 5 % level. We demonstrate that the increase observed is not due to the increasing sizes of birth cohorts and thus must be due to improving survival among this select top tier. We postulate that this super-select group in Denmark is best able to take advantage of the factors driving mortality reduction, whereas the majority of centenarians are not. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1007/s13524-018-0755-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
- Subjects :
- Male
Percentile
Increasing lifespan
Denmark
Longevity
Population
Article
Cohort Studies
Danish
03 medical and health sciences
Life Expectancy
0302 clinical medicine
Lifespan trends
Centenarians
Humans
Medicine
Registries
030212 general & internal medicine
Sex Distribution
education
030304 developmental biology
Demography
Aged, 80 and over
Sweden
Cohort comparison
0303 health sciences
education.field_of_study
business.industry
Mortality reduction
language.human_language
Quantile regression
language
Regression Analysis
Female
Centenarian
business
Birth cohort
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 15337790 and 00703370
- Volume :
- 56
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Demography
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....04483914decd90c924c93d45fc90f7e8