Tag Archives: centenarian

One in four UK children will live to 100

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London: More than a quarter of all children living in Britain today will become centenarians, according to new UK government statistics.
 
children.jpgThis means that of the 4 million children now aged 16 and under, 3.3million (27 per cent) will celebrate their 100th birthday.Across all age groups there is a one in six change of reaching 100.

A 16-year-old boy is expected to live until he is nearly 88, while a girl of the same age will reach 91. Around 900,000 future ‘centenarians’ are pensioners over 65.
Nearly 10 per cent of people over 65 will get to 100, rising to 12.3 per cent of people aged 51 to 65 and 18.5 per cent of people aged 17 to 50.

The figures are a worry for pension providers including the UK state pension. One proposal being considered is that the age will continue to go up whenever official life expectancy forecasts are increased.

It also raises anotehr issue of millions of people surviving until their 100th birthday with a dwindling income and poor health. 

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Italian becomes first Nobel Prize centenarian

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Rita Levi-Montalcini this week become the first Nobel Prize-winner to reach the age of 100. And her longevity and mental vigor is said to be attributed to daily doses of nerve growth factor (NGF), the discovery that made her name.

Dr Levi-Montalcini, who was born in 1909, was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize for Medicine with American, Stanley Cohen, for their research into NGF: the proteins and amino-acids which enable the cells of the nervous system to grow and take on specialised tasks.

Italian-born Dr Levi-Montalcini, a neurologist and development biologist, still works every day at the European Brain Research Institute, which she founded in Rome.

She said: “If I’m not mistaken,” she said, “I can say my mental capacity is greater than when I was 20 because it has been enriched by so many experiences, in the same way that my curiosity and desire to be close to those who suffer has not diminished.”

Dr Levi-Montalcini is reputed to take daily doses of NGF, which was discovered in 1979, in the form of eye drops.
NGF is believed to have an important role in the peripheral nervous system, but then it emerged that it has a very important role in the brain and helps preserve neuron integrity.

The Italian Government recently granted her research institute €500,000 (£448,000) to continue its work.

Born in Turin , Dr Levi-Montalcini was from a cultured Jewish family in Turin in 1909, the daughter of an electrical engineer and a painter. Defying her father’s wishes, she went to medical school and graduated in 1936.

She immediately enrolled as a postgraduate, but in the same year Mussolini published his Manifesto for the Defence of the Race, followed in 1938 by new laws banning “inferior races” from education and forcing her out of university.

She fled to Belgium to continue her studies, but the imminent invasion of the Nazis in 1940 forced her to return to Turin, where she constructed a laboratory in her bedroom. When the Allies bombed the city in 1941, she fled to the countryside and built another lab in a country cottage.

Then the German invasion of Italy in 1943 sent her fleeing to Florence, where she lived incognito until the war’s end, working as a nurse and doctor among the disease-ridden refugees. After the war she accepted an invitation to study in America, where in the subsequent decades her most important work was done. She only returned to Italy full time after she retired in 1977.

Dr Levi-Montalcini was made a senator for life in 2001 and from 2005 to 2007 she played a vital role in supporting the centre-left government of Romano Prodi, which had a wafer-thin Senate majority and needed every vote to stay afloat. Despite her age, Dr Levi-Montalcini never failed it, earning the wrath of the right-wing opposition in the process.

Japan has most centenarians

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Tokyo: The number of Japanese living beyond 100 has more than doubled over the past six years to a record high of more than 36,000 this year, with women in the majority.

By the end of this September, Japan will have 36,276 people aged 100 years or older, surpassing last year’s 32,295. Women account for 86 percent of the total, according to figures from the Health and Welfare Ministry.

Each new centenarian will receive a letter from the prime minister and a silver cup.

Japan has one of the world’s longest life expectancies – nearly 86 years for women and 79 years for men.

The number of centenarians has been on the rise for nearly 40 years, and accelerating its pace after surpassing 10,000 in 1998, the ministry said.

Japan’s centenarian population is expected to reach nearly 1 million – the world’s largest – by 2050, according to UN projections.

A 113-year-old woman from the southern island of Okinawa, where the elderly have the highest longevity, is the country’s oldest.

Although she requires assistance to carry out her daily activities, she enjoys going outside in a wheelchair with a nurse, the ministry said.

Japan’s oldest man, Tomoji Tanabe, 112, from the southern area of Miyazaki, says he follows a rigorous health regime. He rises early, reads newspapers every morning and drinks milk in the afternoon, and keeps a diary every evening.

Okinawa has the highest concentration of centenarians, with 838, or 61 for every 100,000 people. That is far above a nationwide average of just over 28 per 100,000.

The ratio for Tokyo is about 25 in 100,000, and that for the US is about 10 per 100,000. As of the end of last year, China, with a population of 1.3 billion, had 18,000 centenarians.

The Centenarian

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Interesting information and articles on living to be 100: www.thecentenarian.co.uk