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 Better medical care and healthier lifestyles helped to boost U.S.
centenarians' ranks to 72,197 in 2014 from 50,281 in 2000, the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report said. More than 80
percent of the centenarians were female.
The numbers should keep rising, since the death rate for
centenarians has fallen since 2008, noted the study's author,
Jiaquan Xu. Some projections show there could be 387,000 U.S.
centenarians in 35 years, he noted.
"People are more aware of their health, of the importance of staying
active and eating healthy food," Xu said.
Genetic research indicates that about 17 percent of the U.S.
population has traits that increase their chances of living past
100, said Dr. Thomas Perls, a geriatrician and director of the New
England Centenarian Study at Boston Medical Center.
"In the early 1900s and before, people could count on losing about a
quarter of their children to infectious diseases and other public
health problems," Perls said.
But with improvements in fighting diseases, people who are
genetically prone to live past 100 are now far more likely to
survive childhood, he said.
Baby boomers, born after World War II through the mid-1960s, are
likely to swell the ranks of centenarians even further, Perls noted.
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The top causes of death among centenarians in 2014 were heart
disease, Alzheimer's disease, stroke, cancer, influenza and
pneumonia, the CDC study found.
Deaths from Alzheimer's increased 119 percent between 2000 and 2014,
which Xu attributed to greater awareness of the disease, resulting
in more diagnoses.
SOURCE: http://1.usa.gov/1nAD1M5 National Center for Health
Statistics, online January 20, 2016.
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