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Since World War II, a substantial demographic change has occurred with an increasing proportion of old and oldest-old people in high-income countries. This change is attributed to three major factors: improved survival of older people, the large post-World War II birth cohorts (“The Baby Boomers”) entering the old age segment, and declining birth rates (Christensen et al. 2009). In many countries the number of centenarians has increased exponentially since the 1950s, mainly explained by declines in oldest-old mortality (Robine and Cubaynes 2017). Increased welfare, education, and socioeconomic conditions as well as medical achievements and improved medical treatment regimes are likely explanations for the decline in mortality. However, this raises also a question of whether more recent birth cohorts of centenarians have survived in a more frail state and with higher levels of disability and disease compared to their age peers from earlier centenarian birth cohorts...
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Acknowledgments
We thank Signe Høi Rasmussen, MD, PhD, and Mikael Thinggaard, MSc, PhD, for their substantial contribution to the Danish centenarian cohort studies. Danish National Research Foundation; U.S. National Institute on Aging – National Institutes of Health [Grant PO1-AG08761]; Danish Health Insurance Foundation [Grant 2006B139]; Danish Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation; Danish Interdisciplinary Research Council; The Danish Council for Independent Research – Medical Science [Grant 09–070081]; the Novo Nordisk Foundation; the Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Southern Denmark; the Clinical Institute of Research, University of Southern Denmark; the Agnes and Knut Mørk Foundation; The Health Foundation (Helsefonden) [Grant nr.16-B-0271]. The Danish Aging Research Center is supported by a grant from the VELUX FOUNDATION.
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Andersen-Ranberg, K., Jeune, B., Christensen, K. (2019). Danish Centenarians Studies. In: Gu, D., Dupre, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Gerontology and Population Aging. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69892-2_1001-1
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