Old people are getting even older. The age to which the oldest people live
has been rising for more than a century, and “there is no hint yet that trend is
slowing down”, says John Wilmoth of the University of California, Berkeley.
Wilmoth and his colleagues studied death records in Sweden, which date back to
1861, and used a computer model to calculate the “average oldest age at death”
for Swedish men and women. That average rose to about 105 in the 1960s, and shot
up to 108 in the 1990s (Science, vol 289, p 2366).
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