The advancing frontier of survival

This volume is an additional contribution to the description of the mortality of the oldest-old in the post-war era, begun with volume 1 by the same author. While the first publication was essentially a time series studies, the present one is a life table analysis of the same countries in the same period, less precise on timing and more sharply focused on age. Instead of annual fluctuations in 5-year or broader age groups, dealt with in the former, the present study examines mortality by single years of age. To do it successfully, the data are combined into 10-year periods in order to secure meaningful numbers of observations at ages where they are few. This has, in fact, allowed calculation of fairly robust death rates up to age 109 for an aggregate of several countries.