There is great interest among gerontologists, demographers, and actuaries in the question concerning the limits to human longevity. Attempts at getting answers to this important question have stimulated many studies on late-life mortality trajectories, often with opposing conclusions. One group of researchers believes that mortality stops growing with age at extreme old ages, and that hence there is no fixed limit to the human life span. Other studies found that mortality continues to grow with age up to extreme old ages. Our study suggests a possible solution to this controversy. We found that mortality deceleration is best observed when older, less accurate life span data are analyzed, while in the case of more recent and reliable data there is a persistent mortality growth with age. We compared the performance (goodness of fit) of two competing mortality models - the Gompertz model and the Kannisto ("mortality deceleration") model - at ages of 80-105 years using data for 1880-1899 single-year birth cohorts of US men and women. The mortality modeling approach suggests a transition from mortality deceleration to the Gompertzian mortality pattern over time for both men and women. These results are consistent with the hypothesis about disappearing mortality deceleration over time due to improvement in the accuracy of age reporting. In the case of more recent data, mortality continues to grow with age even at very old ages. This observation may lead to more conservative estimates of future human longevity records.
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