Description: Graphs mortality experience over the prior 15 years, show possible trends over the prior 80 years, discusses the impact on liabilities and funding of the New York public retirement system based on projections of life expectancy, and discusses the possible factors that have affected mortality.

Description: Discussion of three papers presented at Living to 100 and Beyond symposium. Papers discussed: ' The Roles of Aging, Longevity Determination and Pathology on Human Life Span and Life Expectation' by Hayflick, 'Plastic Omega' by Held, and 'Underlying and Multiple Cause Mortality at Advanced Ages: United State 1980 - 1998' by Stallard. The first paper is an overview on aging, the second paper is a survey of aging research and the third paper discusses underlying and multiple cause mortality.

Description: Discussion of papers presented at Living to 100 and Beyond symposium. Papers discussed: 'Dealing with Problems in Data Quality for the Measurement of Mortality at Advanced Ages' in Canada by Bourbeau and Desjardins, 'Mortality at Advanced Ages in Spain' by Felipe and Anguera, and 'Emergence of Supercentenarians in Low Mortality Countries' by Robine and Vaupei. These papers all deal with centenarians.

Description: Discussion of three papers presented at Living to 100 and Beyond symposium. Papers discussed: Paper by Ken Faig on how the Social Security Administration's Master Death File can be used as a resource to investigate mortality at later ages, paper by Kestenbaum and Ferguson on how to improve the quality of the information available on old age mortality, and paper by Gallop on older age mortality in the UK derived from public pension data.

Description: Presented at Living to 100 symposium January 2002. This paper evaluates age and sex specific patterns of change in underlying and multiple cause of death reports for the period 1980-1998 for 14 leading causes of death at ages 65 and older. Changes in four types of mortality measures will be analyzed: 1 underlying cause death rates 2 multiple cause death rates 3 associated cause death rates and 4 death rates based on the joint occurrences of multiple cause conditions. Implications of the results are discussed in the context of existing models for analyzing and forecasting future mortality patterns in the U.S.

Description: Presented at Living to 100 Symposium, January 2002. This paper is a first attempt to assess which group of mortality trajectories proposed by various researchers is confirmed by empirical data between the age of 110 and 115 years when the exponential trajectories on the one hand and the logistic or quadratic trajectories on the other hand have diverged sufficiently.

Description: The paper gives an overview of the data that are available and discusses the problems encountered in estimating mortality rates at old ages in the UK. It describes some of the methodologies used to construct mortality rates at advanced ages for official life tables and recent work undertaken by the UK Government Actuary’s Department to construct a database of historical mortality rates for the United Kingdom going back to 1961. Mortality tables for ages 85 and above are provided for years 1961 - 2000 by gender. Finally, possible methods for projecting mortality at advanced ages are discussed.

Description: Discussion of three papers presented at Living to 100 and Beyond symposium. Papers discussed: 'Morality at Advanced Ages' by Virga, 'Factors Affecting Mortality in a Small Sample of Older Adults' by Jones, Kwon, Paterson, Cunningham, and Kovai, and 'Detection and Significance of Frailty in Elderly Insurance Applicants' by Pokorski. The first paper develops mortality tables from retired federal employee data.

Description: Paper presented at Living to 100 symposium January 2002. Study describes the increase in life expectancy at birth in Japan, the emergence of centenarians, the trends in the number of deaths of centenarians, and the increase in maximum reported age at death. Death rates above the age of 100 in Japan since 1963 are computed and analyzed. This study completes and updates results presented in a previous study Robine and Saito, 200X.

Description: Presented at Living to 100 symposium, January 2002. This paper proposes a standard operating procedure for testing the Gompertz assumption using yearly age-specific mortality data, and the impacts of the data collection period and population sizes on the testing results are discussed.