Volume 48 - Article 11 | Pages 321–338 
The question of the human mortality plateau: Contrasting insights by longevity pioneers
Date received: | 19 Jan 2021 |
Date published: | 28 Feb 2023 |
Word count: | 3617 |
Keywords: | age, France, Gompertz mortality, mortality, mortality plateau, older population, parametric models, supercentenarians, survival analysis, trajectories |
DOI: | 10.4054/DemRes.2023.48.11 |
Additional files: | readme.48-11 (text file, 310 Byte) |
demographic-research.48-11 (zip file, 45 kB) | |
Abstract
Background: The debate about limits to the human life span is often based on outcomes from mortality at the oldest ages among longevity pioneers. To this day, scholars disagree on the existence of a late-life plateau in human mortality. Amid various statistical analysis frameworks, the parametric proportional hazards model is a simple and valuable approach to test the presence of a plateau by assuming different baseline hazard functions on individual-level data.
Objective: We replicate and propose some improvements to the methods of Barbi et al. (2018) to explore whether death rates reach a plateau at later ages in the French population as it does for Italians in the original study.
Methods: We use a large set of exceptionally reliable data covering the most recently extinct birth cohorts, 1883–1901, where all 3,789 members who were born and died in France, were followed from age 105 onward. Individual life trajectories are modeled by a proportional hazards model with fixed covariates (gender, birth cohort) and a Gompertz baseline hazard function.
Results: In contrast with Barbi et al. (2018)’s results, our Gompertz slope parameter estimate is statistically different from zero across all model specifications, suggesting death rates continue to increase beyond 105 years old in the French population. In addition, we find no significant birth cohort effect but a significant male disadvantage in mortality after age 105.
Conclusions: Using the best data currently available, we did not find any evidence of a mortality plateau in French individuals aged 105 and older.
Contribution: The evidence for the existence of an extreme-age mortality plateau in recent Italian cohorts does not extend to recent French cohorts. Caution in generalizations is advised, and we encourage further studies on long-lived populations with high-quality data.
Author's Affiliation
Linh Hoang Khanh Dang - Institut National d'Études Démographiques (INED), France
Carlo Giovanni Camarda - Institut National d'Études Démographiques (INED), France
France Meslé - Institut National d'Études Démographiques (INED), France
Nadine Ouellette - Université de Montréal, Canada
Jean-Marie Robine - Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM), France
Jacques Vallin - Institut National d'Études Démographiques (INED), France
Other articles by the same author/authors in Demographic Research
»
Smooth constrained mortality forecasting
Volume 41 - Article 38
»
Is the age difference between partners related to women's earnings?
Volume 41 - Article 15
»
Adult mortality patterns in the former Soviet Union’s southern tier: Armenia and Georgia in comparative perspective
Volume 36 - Article 19
»
Insight on 'typical' longevity: An analysis of the modal lifespan by leading causes of death in Canada
Volume 35 - Article 17
»
The mystery of Japan's missing centenarians explained
Volume 26 - Article 11
»
Changes in the age-at-death distribution in four low mortality countries: A nonparametric approach
Volume 25 - Article 19
»
Occupational inequalities in health expectancies in France in the early 2000s: Unequal chances of reaching and living retirement in good health
Volume 25 - Article 12
»
Revisiting the mortality of France and Italy with the multiple-cause-of-death approach
Volume 23 - Article 28
»
Mortality in the Caucasus: An attempt to re-estimate recent mortality trends in Armenia and Georgia
Volume 22 - Article 23
»
Arthur Roger Thatcher's contributions to longevity research: A Reflexion
Volume 22 - Article 18
»
The compression of deaths above the mode
Volume 22 - Article 17
»
Dissecting the compression of mortality in Switzerland, 1876-2005
Volume 21 - Article 19
»
Geographical diversity of cause-of-death patterns and trends in Russia
Volume 12 - Article 13
»
Life expectancy in two Caucasian countries. How much due to overestimated population?
Volume 5 - Article 7
»
Convergences and divergences in mortality: A new approach of health transition
Special Collection 2 - Article 2
»
Mortality in Central and Eastern Europe: Long-term trends and recent upturns
Special Collection 2 - Article 3
Most recent similar articles in Demographic Research
»
A world apart: Levels and determinants of excess mortality due to COVID-19 in care homes: The case of the Belgian region of Wallonia during the spring 2020 wave
Volume 45 - Article 33 | Keywords: age, mortality
»
Gompertz, Makeham, and Siler models explain Taylor's law in human mortality data
Volume 38 - Article 29 | Keywords: Gompertz mortality, mortality
»
Visualizing compositional data on the Lexis surface
Volume 36 - Article 21 | Keywords: France, mortality
»
Differences in all-cause mortality: A comparison between immigrants and the host population in Norway 1990-2012
Volume 34 - Article 22 | Keywords: mortality, survival analysis
»
The force of mortality by life lived is the force of increment by life left in stationary populations
Volume 32 - Article 29 | Keywords: age, mortality
Articles
Citations
Cited References: 37
»View the references of this article
Download to Citation Manager
Similar Articles
PubMed
»Articles by Linh Hoang Khanh Dang
»Articles by Carlo Giovanni Camarda
»Articles by Jean-Marie Robine
Google Scholar
»Articles by Linh Hoang Khanh Dang
»Articles by Carlo Giovanni Camarda
»Articles by Jean-Marie Robine