Know Any 100 Year Olds? If Not Now, You Will Soon!!

Pew Research Center issued a recent Fact Tank on Centenarians worldwide.  World’s Centenarian Population Projected to Grow Eightfold by 2050 explains the number of centenarians is growing rapidly. Check this out: “[t]he world was home to nearly half a million centenarians (people ages 100 and older) in 2015, more than four times as many as in 1990, according to United Nations estimates. And this growth is expected to accelerate: Projections suggest there will be 3.7 million centenarians across the globe in 2050.”  We know that the oldest-old have been the fastest growing for some time, so it makes sense that the number of centenarians is growing as well.  The report discusses the difficulty in verification of ages for this group for various reasons.

Who has the most centenarians?  “[T]he available data suggest that the U.S. leads the world in terms of the sheer number of centenarians, followed by Japan, China, India and Italy.” The U.S. population isn’t aging as fast as other countries, according to the report, and is “aging at a slower rate than Japan and Italy, partly due to its higher fertility and immigration rates – there are now 2.2 centenarians per 10,000 people.”  By 2050, China will have the greatest number of centenarians, and “[t]he centenarian share of the populations of the U.S. …  will grow less rapidly. There will be 9.7 centenarians per 10,000 people in the U.S. …”