Centenarian

A centenarian is a person who has reached the age of 100 years. Because life expectancies worldwide are below 100 years, the term is invariably associated with longevity. In 2012, the United Nations estimated that there were 316,600 living centenarians worldwide. As life expectancy is increasing across the world, and the world population has also increased rapidly, the number of centenarians is expected to increase quickly in the future. According to the UK ONS, one-third of babies born in 2013 in the UK are expected to live to 100. A supercentenarian, sometimes hyphenated as super-centenarian, is a human who has reached the age of 110, something only achieved by about one in 1,000 centenarians. Even rarer is a person who has lived to age 115 – there are only 48 people in recorded history who have indisputably reached this age, of whom only Kane Tanaka, Lucile Randon, and Shin Matsushita are living as of 2019. Japan currently has the greatest number of known centenarians of any nation with 67,824 according to their 2017 census, along with the highest proportion of centenarians at 34.85 per 100,000 people. Japan started recording its centenarians in 1963. The number of Japanese centenarians in that year was 153, but surpassed the 10,000 mark in 1998; 20,000 in 2003; and 40,000 in 2009. According to a 1998 United Nations demographic survey, Japan is expected to have 272,000 centenarians by 2050; other sources suggest that the number could be closer to 1 million. The incidence of centenarians in Japan was one per 3,522 people in 2008. In Japan, the number of centenarians is highly skewed towards females. Japan in fiscal year 2016 had 57,525 female centenarians, while males were 8,167, a ratio of 7:1. The increase of centenarians was even more skewed at 11.6:1. The total number of living centenarians in the world remains uncertain. It was estimated by the Population Division of the United Nations as 23,000 in 1950, 110,000 in 1990, 150,000 in 1995, 209,000 in 2000, 324,000 in 2005 and 455,000 in 2009. However, these older estimates did not take into account the contemporary downward adjustments of national estimates made by several countries such as the United States; thus, in 2012, the UN estimated there to be only 316,600 centenarians worldwide. The following table gives estimated centenarian populations by country, including both the latest and the earliest known estimates, where available.