Supercentenarian

A supercentenarian (sometimes hyphenated as super-centenarian) is someone who has lived to or passed their 110th birthday. This age is achieved by about one in 1,000 centenarians. Anderson et al. concluded that supercentenarians live a life typically free of major age-related diseases until shortly before maximum human lifespan is reached (125 years).

There are estimated to be 300–450 living supercentenarians in the world, though approximately 100 verified cases are known. A study conducted in 2010 showed that the countries with the most known supercentenarians (living and dead, in order of total) were the United States,Japan, the United Kingdom, France, and Italy.

The first verified supercentenarian in human history died in the late nineteenth century. Until the 1980s, the oldest age attained by supercentenarians was 115, but this has since been surpassed.

The term supercentenarian has been in existence since at least the nineteenth century. The term ultracentenarian was also used to describe someone well over 100 (Norris McWhirter, editor of Guinness World Records, used the word in correspondence with age claims researcher A. Ross Eckler, Jr. in 1976), and was further popularised in 1991 by William Strauss and Neil Howe in their book entitled Generations. Early references tend to mean simply "someone well over 100", but the 110-and-over cutoff is the accepted criterion of demographers.

While claims of extreme age have persisted from the earliest times in history, the earliest supercentenarian accepted by Guinness World Records is Dutchman Thomas Peters (reportedly 1745–1857). Scholars such as French demographer Jean-Marie Robine, however, consider Geert Adriaans Boomgaard, also of the Netherlands, who turned 110 in 1898, to be the first verifiable case, as the alleged evidence for Peters has apparently been lost. The evidence for the 112 years of Englishman William Hiseland (reportedly 1620–1733) does not meet the standards required by Guinness World Records. Norwegian Church records, the accuracy of which is subject to dispute, also show what appear to be several supercentenarians who lived in the south-central part of present-day Norway during the 16th and 17th centuries, including Johannes Torpe (1549–1664), and Knud Erlandson Etun (1659–1770), both residents of Valdres, Oppland, Norway.

...
Wikipedia