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General Session I Informal Discussion Informal Discussion Transcript General Session I - The Advancing Frontier of Human Survival Presented at the Living to 100 Symposium Orlando, Fla. January 8–10, 2014 Copyright 2014 by the Society of Actuaries. All rights reserved by the Society of Actuaries. Permission is granted to make brief excerpts for a published review. Permission is also granted to make limited numbers of copies of items in this monograph for personal, internal, classroom or other instructional use, on condition that the foregoing copyright notice is used so as to give reasonable notice of the Society’s copyright. This consent for free limited copying without prior consent of the Society does not extend to making copies for general distribution, for advertising or promotional purposes, for inclusion in new collective works or for resale. SOCIETY OF ACTUARIES LT100 General Session I - The Advancing Frontier of Human Survival - Vaupel TIMOTHY HARRIS: I’d like to introduce our keynote speaker, Dr. James Vaupel. Many, if not all, of you know Dr. Vaupel. He’s the executive and founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. He’s a scientific member of the Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science, the German Academy of Sciences and a regular scientific member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. He’s also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. So, with that, Dr. Vaupel. (Applause.) DR. JAMES VAUPEL: What I’d like to do today is to spend a few minutes talking about the advancing frontier of human survival, the fact that we’re living longer. I’ll try to put a special focus on the future of U.S. mortality. I’m very happy to be here because this is an important meeting in terms of thinking about living longer and longer and this is my first time here. I want to go back historically 10 or 20 years and talk about three views about the frontier of survival. The first view was that there’s a fixed frontier; in this view, life spans are limited and this view actually goes all the way back to Aristotle, who in 350 B.C. wrote an essay on the shortness and longness of life. Aristotle compared life to a fire burning in a home in the hearth where you put a certain amount of wood on the fire and lit the fire and LT100-Session I Page 1 of 54 then if you didn’t do anything, the fire would eventually die out, and he called that old age mortality or senescent mortality. The inevitable mortality was when the wood of your life burns out. The other possibility was you could throw sand on the fire or water on the fire and have premature mortality. So he distinguished in 350 B.C. between early death and late mortality or senescent mortality and premature mortality, which is the same thing that James Fries did in 1980 in his very influential article in the New England Journal of Medicine. This view was the dominant view from 350 B.C. up until very recently: that everyone is born with a maximum life span, you can do something about early death, but you can’t do anything about your natural mortality from senescence. Many of you undoubtedly have heard about this view and some of you may subscribe to it. The second view was, yes, there is a maximum length of life for every person and some people might have a maximum life of 80 and other people might have a maximum life of 100, but if you can figure out some secret, then you can evade this natural limit and you can live longer than your ordained number of days. The first major book on this was by Luigi Cornaro in 1558. He was a Venetian. He wrote a book called The Art of Living Long and it’s in Italian. It’s also translated as The Secret of Longevity. And what LT100-Session I Page 2 of 54 was Cornaro’s secret of longevity? Do you know this book? This book was the best-selling book in Europe for 300 years, after the Bible, the best-seller for 300 years. The secret of longevity is dietary restriction, so dietary restriction goes back to 1558 and people are still studying this dietary restriction idea, which seems to work for rodents. Then there was a third view and the third view was that, YES, the frontier of survival is advancing! We just don’t recognize it. This was alluded to earlier. We didn’t have very good data 20 years ago about what was happening at mortality, at the older ages, at the oldest ages, so maybe something was, the frontier was actually advancing, we just didn’t know it. So Ken Manton, Eric Stallard (Eric is coming to this meeting) and I wrote a paper about this in 1979 and we didn’t have data then, we just proposed this as a hypothesis and the question was, “How could we get some data?” So I finally motivated myself to go to Sweden because if you want good data at very high ages, you go to Sweden. So I went to Stockholm and I went to the Statistics of Sweden, found a man called Hans Lindstrom and asked him if I could get some data on mortality after age 80, which hadn’t been computerized, and he took me down into the basement and showed me all this data, and so I raised some money and hired him and for several years on Saturdays and LT100-Session I Page 3 of 54 Sundays, he worked compiling this data and computerizing this data. Finally in the early 1990s, we had some data, some accurate data, on what was happening to mortality at the highest ages, for the first time. So here is mortality at ages 85, 90, 95, for Swedish females. (Hans Lundstrom began by going back to 1900 and then later went back earlier and he stopped in the late 1980s). Here’s the risk of death at age 85. I’ve updated this to the present. So you can see up until 1950 or so, there wasn’t very much progress, but after 1950, there was a dramatic decline in the risk of death after 85; it went from 20 percent to under 10 percent, the annual risk. At age 90, the same pattern and at age 95, the same pattern. Of course, it bounces around a lot because there weren’t very many 95-year-old Swedes but you can see the dramatic decline from the level of something above .4 to a level of about .3. So, it’s not true that nothing can be done about mortality at the highest ages; death rates at the highest ages, at least since 1950, have been substantially reduced. So this was replicated subsequently in many countries in large part because of the work done by demographers to establish the Human Mortality Database, John Wilmoth and Vladimir Shkolnikov. So here we have women ages 80 to 89 and men ages 80 to 89. First this is Sweden; LT100-Session I Page 4 of 54 so we go from 1950, now I don’t know if you can see the small print, but this is from 1950 until the present. Swedish death rates, the standardized death rate for octogenarian Swedish women, and you can see the steady decline. Here’s the same pattern for French women, even more dramatic progress; here’s the Japanese women, astounding progress; and here’s the United States. Ken Manton and I wrote about this in the early 1990s talking about the U.S. survival advantage among the very oldest Americans, but at about the same time we published our paper, the United States was overtaken by France and Japan and there was a period of stagnation among older Americans for a while but then more recently this period of stagnation has ended. I don’t have the latest data here, this is from the Human Mortality Database, but if you look at the latest estimates, the U.S. trend is continuing to go down. Then here’s a bunch of other countries. For men, the same basic pattern but mortality is higher for males, of course, so these are the Swedish men, the French men, the Japanese men, the U.S. men. So again, a period of stagnation followed by, more recently, by progress and the U.S. males are doing about as well as anybody and then a bunch of other countries. So you can see there really has been a substantial decline in octogenarian LT100-Session I Page 5 of 54 mortality. How about nonagenarians, people in their 90s? Let’s go through this together. So here’s Sweden, some big decline but some leveling off recently; France no sign of any leveling off; Japan amazing progress. Even though the Japanese have the world’s longest life expectancy, they’re making very rapid progress in bringing death rates down at the highest ages. The United States, so again, a long period of stagnation for the U.S. women, followed by recent improvement and a bunch of other countries. OK, so Sweden males, French males, Japanese males, U.S. males. The United States is different and sometimes American actuaries don’t realize how different the United States is. The United States is part of the world, and events elsewhere in the world are going to influence events in the United States: the United States is not going to fall further and further behind the rest of the world.
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