The Age-Trajectory of Mortality at Ages 100 and beyond: An Analysis of Individual-Level Data in Canada

Nadine Ouellette, Institut National d'Études Démographiques (INED)
Robert R. Bourbeau, Université de Montréal

Despite an accumulation of empirical and theoretical evidence in the last two decades in favor of a slowdown in the rate of mortality increase with age, the veracity of mortality deceleration observed at very old ages among humans was recently called into question on the basis of: 1) inaccurate data, 2) invalid assumptions, and/or 3) inadequate mixture of birth cohorts with different mortality experiences. In this paper, we use a highly reliable set of individual-level data on French-Canadians centenarians born 1870-1896 and died 1970-2009 to compute new estimates of the age-trajectory of mortality at ages 100 and beyond. Our preliminary results suggest that the rate of mortality increase with age tends to slow down at very old ages, even when special care is taken to avoid problems 1) to 3) outlined above.