The age-trajectory of mortality for french-canadian centenarians
Type de matériel :
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With the remarkable decline in mortality among the elderly after the second half of the twentieth century, the number of centenarians has increased spectacularly in low-mortality countries. In this era of human life extension, it is becoming increasingly important to obtain precise mortality at very advanced ages. We use an exhaustive set of data on all French-Canadian centenarians born in Quebec between 1870 and 1896 and who died in Quebec between the 1970-2009 to shed new light on the age-trajectory of mortality beyond 100 years, which remains uncertain and results in significant scientific debates. Thanks to Quebec’s parish registers and Canadian census returns of 1901 and 1911, the age at death of each individual can be verified and the validated data used for our death rate calculations. These are then smoothed using a flexible P-spline approach. These data are complemented with data on septuagenarians, octogenarians, and nonagenarians in Quebec from the Canadian Human Mortality Database. Our results, limited to females due to low numbers of male survivors at very advanced ages, show that the rate of mortality increase slows down with age in this population, thereby supporting the occurrence of mortality deceleration at older ages among humans.
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