Supercentenarian

A supercentenarian is anyone who has lived to be 110 or older. Only about one out of every thousand centenarians makes it that far. Most supercentenarians stay remarkably healthy, avoiding major age-related illnesses like stroke, heart disease, dementia, cancer, Parkinson’s, and diabetes until very near the end of their lives. They typically die when their organs simply run out of reserve capacity.

Etymology

The word itself has been around since at least the 1970s. It gained wider use in 1976 when Guinness World Records editor Norris McWhirter employed it alongside age-claims researcher A. Ross Eckler Jr., and it was further popularized in 1991 by William Strauss and Neil Howe in their book Generations. Originally, “supercentenarian” just meant someone well past 100, but demographers later settled on 110 as the official cutoff. People aged 105 to 109 are sometimes called semisupercentenarians.

Incidence

The Gerontology Research Group maintains a list of all verified living supercentenarians, which typically numbers far fewer than 50. Based on a survival rate of 0.15% to 0.25% from age 100 to 110, researchers estimate there are between 300 and 450 living supercentenarians worldwide. A 2010 study by the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research counted 663 validated supercentenarians (both living and deceased) and found the highest totals—not rates—in the United States, Japan, England plus Wales, France, and Italy. The first reliably verified supercentenarian is often considered to be Margaret Ann Neve (1792–1903), and it wasn’t until 1990 that anyone’s verified age passed 115 (Jeanne Calment).

Some researchers argue that even “verified” supercentenarian data can be unreliable. Document validation, the standard method demographers use, is prone to errors that confirmation bias and other factors may have masked, inflating the number of valid cases. This suggests that many population figures and studies—especially those focused on so-called Blue Zones—may contain substantial mistakes that haven’t been critically reassessed.

In one Blue Zone example, 82% of the supercentenarian population turned out to be missing, imaginary, clerical errors, or dead upon verification. In another, 72% of centenarians were misreported as still alive so family members could collect pension benefits. That study won an Ig Nobel Prize in 2024.