The late-life mortality plateau

Assembled from 15 blocks · 2 evidence · 5 related

1. Story
2. The observation that, at extreme ages, the death rate stops rising as the Gompertz law predicts and appears to level off. Barbi, Lagona, Marsili, Vaupel and Wachter reported in Science in 2018, using individually validated Italian records for people aged 105 and over, that the annual hazard of death flattens at roughly one half — that is, a person of 108 has about the same chance of dying within the year as a person of 112. If that is real, there is no age at which death becomes certain, and a strict biological ceiling on human lifespan is not implied by the mortality data. The finding is disputed on grounds of age misreporting: at these ages the number of people is tiny, a single misrecorded birth year distorts the estimate, and a systematic tendency for ages to be overstated would produce an artefactual plateau. The Italian data were assembled specifically to answer that objection, which is why the paper matters.
3. Knowledge
4. The Gompertz mortality law
5. The late-life mortality plateau
6. Connections
7. The Gompertz mortality law
8. Mortality is reported to plateau after age 105
9. Compression of mortality (rectangularisation of the survival curve)
10. The late-life mortality plateau
11. Gompertz describes the exponential rise of adult mortality
12. Mortality is reported to plateau after age 105
13. Evidence
14. Supports the reported flattening of the death hazard after about age 105 in individually validated Italian records. V55 verification basis: not retrieved; the approximate one-half annual hazard figure is recalled.
15. Cited to document the record-quality critique of blue zones and supercentenarian data. V55 verification basis: not retrieved; the exact preprint title, its version history and whether any version has since been peer-reviewed and published are all unchecked, which is why this record is flagged as a preprint.