Centenarians - A European Overview

As the oldest continent of the word, Europe presently faces an unprecedented demographic scenario. The number of individuals reaching very advanced ages is growing significantly, and within this age group a very particular one: centenarians. Living up to be 100 years of age, although reachable to only a few of us, is likely to become more common, and this posits important social and health care demands. Long lives’ “secrets” are to be answered by a wide range of professionals like geneticists, biologists, ecologists, and physicians, but also demographers and other social scientists that must disentangle group and individual life trajectories in his- torical time and space, making sense of extraordinary lives that more frequently than ever challenge our imagination as well as our capacity to deliver adequate services and friendly and inclusive societies to accommodate them. With this book, we intend to provide a profile of European centenarians and fill a void on the available information on this population. In an eminently descriptive way, the book intends to first and foremost provide an overview of this population’s characteristics in terms of sex ratio, educational level, marital status, living context and living arrangements, health profiles, and main causes of death. It does not intend to present an extensive justification on the differences observed throughout Europe nor on the geographical tendencies we might observe on their distribution and characteristics. It ultimately aims to provide researchers from these countries and from abroad who are currently working with this population, or intend to do so, an overview of their country outline in comparison with others. The story of how this book came into being dates back to IAGG 2017 World Congress of Gerontology and Geriatrics meeting where we presented a first draft of our work on “Centenarians in Europe”. Three years before we had started collecting data for the first population-based study with centenarians ever conducted in Portugal, the Oporto Centenarian Study (PT100), and wanted to have a global perspective of an up-to-date profile of exceptional longevity at a European level. In conjoining efforts to further elaborate a more detailed profile following IAGG’s presentation, we started receiving a very enthusiastic feedback on the information researchers from other continents, but it mostly reassured the fact that limited amount of systematized information, even at a descriptive level, was available on these matters. In conceptualizing this book, we draw on the expertise gained within the International Centenarian Consortium (ICC) that congregates researchers from all over the world and that has been having regular annual meetings since 1994. Although our presence in the ICC only dates to the meeting of 2014 in Japan, we soon realized the importance of being in touch with some of the world-reference researchers in this field. Some of the ideas we share throughout this book come from those enriching meetings and from the insightful comments we had the chance to receive. Along with the ICC researchers, there is a wide range of people who we would like to express our gratitude. Within such a group we include all the centenarians and their caregivers we had the chance to meet and talk to, and who gave us an unique perspective on what it is like to be that old, and that surely goes far beyond what the numbers we here provide can tell us about them; furthermore, we would also like to express our gratitude to all of the PT100 research team members and faculty colleagues who kept on motivating us in writing the book.