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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2014 May 6.
Published in final edited form as: Nature. 2010 Mar 25;464(7288):536–542. doi: 10.1038/nature08984

Figure 2. The emergence of the extremely old.

Figure 2

The numbers of females aged 100+ in Sweden from 1861 to 2008 and aged 105+ in Japan from 1947 to 2007. Very old people were rare until roughly half a century ago. Since then, the number of Swedish centenarians has risen rapidly, and since 1975 the number of Japanese women 105 or older has climbed almost vertically. (Data from the Kannisto–Thatcher Database on Old Age Mortality (http://www.demogr.mpg.de) supplemented with data from Statistics Sweden and the Japanese Ministry of Health.)