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February 18th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda FRIDAY, Feb. 17 (HealthDay News) — Decades-old assumptions about
the odds of reaching very old age may be wrong, which could put 100 out of
reach for many seniors, a new study finds.
At issue is how likely you are to die each year as you age.
A team of researchers now believe that death rates continue to rise at
the same rate after age 80, instead of flattening out a bit.
The findings could lead to new estimates of life span, affecting
insurance companies and government predictions of how many centenarians
will be around in the future. They could even affect calculations about
how long retirement income will last.
“The risk that people will outlive their savings may be exaggerated,”
said Leonid Gavrilov, a research associate at the Center on Aging at the
University of Chicago and co-author of the study with his wife,
Natalia.
Another expert, Scott Lynch, an associate professor of sociology who
studies demographics at Princeton University in New Jersey, cautioned that
the new research still needs confirmation.
For decades, demographic researchers have believed that your risk of
death doubles every eight years after about age 20 or 30, Gavrilov said.
But researchers thought that that upward slope flattens after the age of
80. People would still die eventually, of course, but their risk of death
didn’t seem to rise as much over time as when they were younger. Once you
got to 80, reaching 100 wasn’t such a stretch, it seemed.
One theory is that people who make it to 80 are just sturdier. After
all, they’ve made it that far in life without dying.
It was thought the flattening of the upward curve might get even
flatter past 100, Lynch explained.
“The speculation has been that at some age, human mortality might
level off and flatten out, so the risk of you dying at 110 is no different
at 111 or 112. But we don’t have reliable data at those ages yet,” said
Lynch, who’s familiar with the study findings.
In the new study, the Gavrilovs examined a U.S. Social Security
database of birth dates and death dates of more than 9 million people born
between 1875 and 1895.
The study authors found that the risk of death each year didn’t stop
rising at the same rate after age 80, as was previously believed. They
said the death rate continued to rise at about the same rate up until age
106.
The findings suggest that people over the age of 80 may not have as
many years as they might assume, Gavrilov said. For this reason, “we need
to be more proactive and support ways to delay aging and extend healthy
life span,” he said.
Lynch said the research makes sense. However, he added, “I’m hesitant
to say that 50 years of theory and studies have been wrong on the basis of
one study.”
The research, published online Feb. 13 in the North American
Actuarial Journal, was funded by the U.S. National Institute on Aging.
The Gavrilovs are expected to present their findings at the annual meeting
of the Chicago Actuarial Association on March 13.
Recently, the U.S. Census Bureau had to revise estimates regarding the
number of centenarians living in the United States. In 2005, it predicted
that by 2010 there would be 114,000 people over 100, but the real total
was less than half that, it found.
More information
The U.S. National Library of Medicine has more about healthy aging.
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