Geography of Italian Centenarians and Semi-Supercentenarians: Statistical Evidences in Territorial Longevity Differences

Giorgia Capacci, Istituto Nazionale di Statistica (ISTAT)
Graziella Caselli , Sapienza Università di Roma
Marco Battaglini, Istituto Nazionale di Statistica (ISTAT)
Silvia Capuano, Italian National Institute of Statistics
Gianni Corsetti, Istituto Nazionale di Statistica (ISTAT)

Since 2009 the Italian National Institute of Statistics (Istat) has been collecting and validating data about living and dead semi-supercentenarians, (SemiSuperCentenarian -SSC- survey). On January 1st 2019, ten years after the survey began, 5,866 living and dead individuals aged 105 and over were collected and validated for the cohorts born between 1896 and 1913, 5,151 women (88%), and 715 men (12%). There are significant geographical differences among semi-supercentenarians, which are partly similar to those already observed in some studies on centenarians. In order to analyse these differences net of the size of the population it is necessary, first of all, to bear in mind that Italy is a country where the cohorts of the study were subject to significant migration flows, both to other countries and within the country. Aim of the paper is to move from description to some explanatory hypothesis of geographical differences of semi-supercentenarian characteristics by applying some statistical models at both aggregated and individual level to the extinct cohorts 1896-1907 of the SSC survey. Results show that among centenarians those who reach age 105 are fewer in the South show the presence of a greater difficulty for all cohorts to become semi-supercentenarians. Referring to our hypotheses the multiple regression analysis confirmed the role of the context in which the semi-supercentenaries are resident in determining the observed geographical differences. On the contrary, the only individual variables collected by birth and death certificates are not able to give meaningful answers.

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 Presented in Session 17. Oldest Old