A Surge in Centenarians
According to the Pew Research Center, centenarians—that is, people aged 100 and over—currently make up 0.03 percent of the total population of the U.S., totaling roughly 101,000 individuals. This percentage is expected to quadruple to an estimated 0.1 percent by 2054, or about 422,000 people.
0.1 percent may not sound like a lot. But especially when you compare these numbers to 1950, when the Census Bureau estimates that there were only 2,300 American centenarians (or about 0.0018 percent of the total population), that’s an enormous increase. To help you understand that difference, we’ll put it in different terms: from 1950 to 2054, over a period of a little more than a century, the proportion of Americans who are centenarians is expected to increase more than 55-fold.
So—what accounts for this enormous surge in the number of centenarians? We’ll cover the most likely contributors, from major developments in the field of public health to huge advancements in medical diagnosis and treatment.
Factors Contributing to the Increase
Public Health Initiatives and Improved Living Standards
From 1900 to 2020, the life expectancy of the average American increased by more than three decades. Public health measures like the chlorination of drinking water in 1908 and better sanitation (especially in previously disease-riddled, filthy urban centers like New York City) significantly lowered the rates of water-borne infectious diseases such as dysentery, cholera, and typhoid.
These changes are also linked to improvements in the average person’s living standards. For instance, before the widespread adoption of home refrigeration, milk pasteurization, and food safety regulations, the likelihood that you might die of a food-borne illness was much higher. This was especially true when there were no antibiotics to treat these illnesses (more on this in the next section).
Advancements in Medicine
There are more medical advancements that have increased our lifespans than we can cover in this post, but we’ll highlight a couple of the most significant.
Widespread access to antibiotics was perhaps the most important medical advancement, with penicillin’s discovery in 1928 leading to a major decline in the kinds of bacterial infections that previously killed many people. In the century since their discovery, antibiotics alone are estimated to have extended the average American lifespan by 23 years.
Our understanding of common illnesses of old age, especially cardiovascular diseases like those that lead to heart attacks, has also advanced significantly. Such diagnosis and treatment has the potential to add decades to people’s lives.
Personalized Medicine and Genetic Research
Personalized medicine is a burgeoning field in which individuals’ treatment plans are customized based on their unique characteristics, including their genetic profile, in sharp contrast to the one-size-fits-all approach of mainstream medicine. The existence of personalized medicine has been made possible by major technological advancements.
For instance, wearables like smart watches make it easy to track vital signs like heart rate over long periods of time, gathering valuable data that would allow your doctor to tailor their treatment plan more effectively.
Genetic screenings also allow for preventive medicine (which seeks to avoid the development of illnesses in advance) rather than curative medicine (which seeks to restore the patient to a state of health once they have already gotten sick). Since the 1990s, genetic screening for susceptibility to breast cancer via testing for the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes has become mainstream, and even more genetic screenings are on the way. This will very likely help to extend lifespans further across the population.
Healthier Lifestyle Choices
Remember how everyone used to smoke cigarettes inside, filling our shared air with cigarette smoke everywhere from restaurants to airplanes? These days, smoking is much less common. From 1965 to 2020, the percentage of adults in the U.S. who smoked cigarettes decreased from 45 percent to just 12.5 percent. Quitting smoking can increase your life expectancy by as much as a decade—fewer smokers means fewer people dying early of heart disease, cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), stroke, and other serious conditions. For instance, although heart disease is still the leading cause of death in the U.S., death rates from heart disease have declined by a whopping 60 percent since 1950.
How About Your Own Life Expectancy?
Now that you know that centenarians are on the rise, and understand the myriad reasons behind this shift, you may be curious about what your own longevity looks like. If so, try our Life Expectancy Calculator for a data-based estimate of how key factors are influencing your health.
And for even more blog posts that delve deep into numerous aspects of longevity, don’t forget to check our Life Lessons section on a regular basis.
