Anne Herm

Centenarians’ Marital History and Living Arrangements: Pathways to Extreme Longevity

OBJECTIVES Mortality risk for older persons is associated with marital status and living arrangements, for example, living alone, with a spouse, with others but without a spouse, or in a collective household. This study analyzed the marital history and living arrangements of centenarians with the aim of identifying which trajectories are associated with reaching an advanced age. METHOD Original longitudinal register-based data for 3,000 Belgian centenarians born between the years 1893 and 1903 were used to reconstruct their marital history and living arrangements during their later life (from age 60 to 100). RESULTS The marital history and living arrangements for male and female centenarians were strikingly different after they reached the age of 60. From age 60 to 100, male centenarians lived twice as long with their wife as female centenarians did with their husband. Female centenarians lived alone for more than half of their lives. Male centenarians had younger wives and female centenarians had older husbands than non-centenarians. More than half of the widowers remarried and did so with a woman who was generally more than 10 years younger. Most centenarians ended their life in a nursing home but entered it very late in life. DISCUSSION In very old age, living with a spouse is beneficial for men but not for women, for whom living alone is more advantageous than living with a spouse. This study compares the marital history and living arrangement trajectory of centenarians with people who did not live as long to determine associated mortality risks confirming that men are often not able to live by themselves, whereas women seem to have few problems to manage on their own.

Living arrangements and marital status: a register-based study of survival of older adults in Belgium at the beginning of the 21st century

ABSTRACT Being married reduces the mortality risk of older persons. More generally, living arrangements that include co-residence with a source of support and a close care-giver are associated with a lower mortality risk. We build a detailed typology of private and collective living arrangements, including marital status, and check its association with mortality risks, controlling for health status. Using administrative data from the population register, we identify the living arrangement of all individuals aged 65 years and over living in Belgium as at 1 January 2002, and their survival during the year 2002. Data on health status are extracted from the 2001 census. We use binary logistic regression with the probability to die as outcome and living arrangement, health, age and gender as covariates. Our results show that mortality is more closely associated with actual living arrangements than with marital status. This association is age and gender-specific and remains even at very old ages. Living with a spouse is confirmed to be beneficial for survival but in older age living alone becomes more favourable. Of all living arrangements, older persons living in religious communities experience the lowest mortality risk whereas those living in nursing homes experience the highest risk.

Fertility History, Children’s Gender, and Post-Reproductive Survival in a Longevous Population

ABSTRACT The question of whether mothers’ fertility history influences their post-reproductive survival has been addressed frequently in the scientific literature. Using data from Villagrande Strisaili, Sardinia, where longevity is higher than anywhere else in Europe, we analyzed the relationship between the fertility pattern of mothers who survived past age 50 (n = 539) and their post-reproductive lifespan. We find that, after adjustment for potential confounders (mothers’ birth cohort, survival of spouse), the mothers who on average delivered their children later displayed a reduced mortality risk (‒2.9 percent for each additional year), supporting previously reported findings. We also find that a male-skewed offspring ratio was associated with decreased mortality risk of mothers, with longer survival of mothers who delivered their sons above age 35 (p = 0.005), a result not found for daughters. So far, no biological explanation has been suggested for the positive effect of delivering sons later in life. We conjecture that in our dataset stronger nonbiological factors such as gender-specific sociocultural and economic factors may have masked the negative effect reported in other populations, for which a biological explanation was proposed.