Centenarian Incidence
A centenarian is a person who lives beyond the age of 100 years. Because current average life expectancies across the world are less than 100, the term is invariably associated with longevity. Much rarer, a supercentenarian is a person who has lived to the age of 110 or more, something only achieved by about one in a thousand centenarians. Even rarer is a person who has lived to 115 years old; only 1 in 50,000 centenarians make it to this age.
The United States currently has the greatest number of centenarians in the world, estimated at 70,490 on September 1, 2010. This statistic is partly a result of America’s large population in 1890–1910, its large farm population a century ago, and its increased emphasis on long-term care facilities.
Japan has the second largest number of centenarians, with 44,449 reported as of September 2010. Japan started its surveys in 1963, at which time the number of Japanese centenarians was found to be 153. This number surpassed the 10,000 mark in 1998; 20,000 in 2003 and 40,000 in 2009. According to a UN Demographic survey, by 2050 Japan is expected to have 272,000 centenarians. However, some sources suggest that the number could be closer to 1 million. Many experts attribute Japan’s high life expectancy to the Japanese diet, which is particularly low in refined simple carbohydrates, and to hygienic practices. In addition, the number of centenarians in relation to the total population was, in September 2010, 114% higher in Shimane Prefecture than the ratio for the whole of Japan. This ratio was also 92% higher in Okinawa Prefecture.[8] Okinawa Prefecture used to have the highest percentage of centenarians in Japan. Early estimates were possibly exaggerated, but the corrected ratio was still 139% higher than the average for Japan in September 2006. In addition to diet, there are four other factors that have been found to increase the life expectancy for Okinawans, as noted later in the “research into centenarians” section of this article.
The incidence of centenarians in Japan was 1 per 3,522 people in 2008 (but much higher in Okinawa, at 1 per 1,838 people in 2006), and 1 per 4,400 in the United States.
However, the number of Japanese centenarians was called into question in 2010 following a series of reports showing that hundreds of thousands of elderly people had gone “missing” in the country. The deaths of many centenarians had not been reported, casting doubt on the reliability of not only the Japanese statistics, but also the country’s reputation for having a large population of centenarians.
source: en.wikipedia.org
