“We are witnessing a spectacular increase in the number of very old people, even if it is still negligible from a demographic point of view,” demographer France Meslé, one of the study’s authors, told the French news agency AFP.
According to the estimate of the French statistical office (INSEE). the number of people aged 105 or older on January 1, 2023 was almost two thousand in Francei.e. as much as the centenarians in 1981.
There are currently 31,000 of the latter, almost thirty times as many as in 1970. And although there is no record of the death of a single supercentenarian before 1987, in 2022 there were already 39 supercentenarians living in France, 38 of whom were women.
The vast majority of people over 100 are women (according to INSEE, 86 percent in 2023), their proportion is even higher among those over 105 (more than 90 percent in 2020), and is spectacular among the super-hundreds.
Women over 105 they usually did hard outdoor work, were farmers or farmwives, and ate a healthy, unprocessed diet – says Laurent Toussier, an expert on super hundreds.
In the continental part of France, there is no county that really stands out in terms of the number of people over one hundred years old. However, the INED study focuses on people aged 105 and over, and particularly people aged 110 and over found a surprising overrepresentation in the Antilles. In relation to the population, Guadeloupe and Martinique have almost eight times as many super-hundreds as in the mother country.
There is no clear explanation for this phenomenon, but there are “assumptions that still need to be verified”, such as “the peculiar nature of the population of these islands, which are basically the descendants of long-suffering slaves”. “These extreme conditions may have led to the selection of the fittest, and thus perhaps to the selection of longevity genes,” the researchers note.
According to INSEE, the most centenarians lived last year in France, where the life expectancy of women is the highest in the European Union (85.2 years in 2022).
The supposed oldest French woman, Marie-Rose Tessier lives in a nursing home in Les Sables-d’Olonne, west of Paris, celebrates his 114th birthday on May 21. 117-year-old Maria Branyas Morera, who was born in the United States and lives in Spain, is considered the world’s oldest person.
French Jeanne Calment, who died at the age of 122 in 1997, was the longest-lived person in the world, according to Guinness World Records.
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