There are more and more “super-hundreds” in this country, they don’t know why

More and more people over the age of 100 live in France, and a new age group, the “supercentenarians”, has also appeared, which includes people over 110 years of age – according to a study published on Wednesday by the French National Institute of Demographic Studies (INED).

“The number of very old people is increasing dramatically, even if from a demographic point of view this is still negligible” – He told Demographer France Meslé, one of the authors of the study for the French news agency AFP.

According to the French statistics office, the number of people aged 150 or older on January 1, 2023 was almost two thousand in France, which is the same as the number of centenarians in 1981. There are currently thirty thousand of the latter, almost thirty times as many as in 1970. And although there is no record of the death of a single superhundred before 1987, in 2022 there were already thirty-nine living in France, thirty-eight of whom were women.

The vast majority of people over one hundred years old are women (eighty-six percent in 2023), their proportion is even higher among people over one hundred and five years old (more than ninety percent in 2020), and it is also spectacular among the super-hundreds.

Women over the age of 105 usually worked hard outdoors, were farmers or farmwives, and followed a diet based on healthy, unprocessed products, says Laurent Toussier, an expert on supercentenarians.
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. In the Antilles, however, there are surprisingly many people who are one hundred and five years old and older, especially people who are one hundred and ten years old and even older. Compared 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”, such as “the population of these islands is basically the descendants of the long-suffering slaves”. “These extreme conditions may have led to the selection of the fittest and thus perhaps to the selection of longevity genes” they believe the researchers.

Most centenarians lived in France last year, where the life expectancy of women is the highest in the European Union (85.2 years in 2022). The presumed oldest French woman, Marie-Rose Tessier, lives in a nursing home in Les Sables-d’Olonne, west of Paris, and celebrates her 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.

According to Eurostat, the average age of Europeans continued to rise, and the data also revealed which country has the highest and lowest number on the continent.

(Source: MTI, images: Getty Images)

demographics | hundred years | long life | age | France