A supercentenarian is someone who has reached the age of 110 or older. While centenarians (people who live to 100) are becoming increasingly common worldwide, supercentenarians remain extraordinarily rare. An estimated 8,900 are alive globally at any given time, though roughly half of them are never formally counted or verified by longevity tracking organizations.
How Supercentenarians Differ From Centenarians
Longevity researchers divide extreme age into three tiers. Centenarians are 100 or older. Semi-supercentenarians fall between 105 and 109. Supercentenarians have crossed the 110-year threshold. These distinctions matter because each group shows meaningfully different patterns in health, genetics, and survival.
The oldest verified person in history was Jeanne Louise Calment of Arles, France, who was born in 1875 and died in 1997 at age 122. Her record, authenticated by the Guinness Book of World Records, still stands nearly three decades later. Very few people make it past 114, with modeling estimates suggesting only around 330 individuals worldwide reach that age at any point.
The Gender Gap at Extreme Ages
About 90% of supercentenarians are women. Several biological factors help explain this striking imbalance. Testosterone, which benefits men earlier in life by building muscle and bone strength, becomes a liability with age. It increases the risk of blood clots, atherosclerosis, heart disease, and stroke. This is an example of what biologists call antagonistic pleiotropy: a trait that helps you reproduce young can hurt you later.
Women also carry two X chromosomes, while men have only one. Although women inactivate one of their two X chromosomes in each cell, having a “backup” copy to choose from may provide a survival edge. Many genes that influence aging reside on the X chromosome, and having two options rather than one appears to offer some protection against age-related disease.
How Their Health Stays Intact Longer
One of the most remarkable things about supercentenarians isn’t just that they live longer. It’s that they spend a smaller fraction of their lives being sick. A study that followed over 100 supercentenarians alongside hundreds of centenarians and younger age groups found a clear pattern: the older the age group, the later the onset of cancer, cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, and other major illnesses.
Researchers categorized people into three groups based on when their first serious disease appeared. “Survivors” developed at least one disease before 80. “Delayers” got sick between 80 and 99. “Escapers” made it past 100 before any major illness showed up. Supercentenarians were far more likely to be delayers or escapers. In practical terms, this means they compressed their period of illness into the very end of life rather than spending decades managing chronic disease. Their health span closely matched their life span.
Genetics of Extreme Longevity
A gene called FOXO3A has emerged as one of the strongest genetic links to exceptional lifespan. It helps regulate how cells respond to insulin and growth signals, influencing metabolism, insulin sensitivity, and the risk of coronary heart disease and diabetes. Researchers consider it something of a master switch: variations in this single gene can affect a broad network of downstream processes that collectively extend life.
The genetic signal gets stronger at the extremes. In a study of German centenarians, a key variant of FOXO3A appeared in 44% of people aged 100 to 104, but in 52% of those aged 105 to 110. That steady increase in frequency with age suggests the variant isn’t just loosely associated with longevity. It’s actively contributing to survival at the highest ages. The association was considerably stronger in centenarians than in people who lived to their 90s, reinforcing how important these genetic variants become as age increases.
Verifying Someone’s Age
Claiming to be 110 is one thing. Proving it is another. The Gerontology Research Group (GRG), one of the main organizations that tracks supercentenarians, requires a minimum of three documents spanning the beginning, middle, and end of a person’s life. The birth record must originate from the first 20 years of life, which leaves some room for error, since early census records weren’t always reliable. This standard is sometimes called “validation by proxy.”
The process has limitations. Identity switches, early age exaggerations, and incomplete record-keeping in many countries mean that some validated claims may still be questionable, while many legitimate supercentenarians in regions with poor documentation go uncounted. As of 2024, about half of the world’s estimated supercentenarians have never been validated by any tracking organization. DNA testing has been proposed as a more definitive tool, using comparisons with living relatives to confirm identity and rule out fraud, but it hasn’t yet been widely adopted.
Does Death Risk Plateau After 110?
A longstanding theory in aging research held that mortality rates flatten out after about age 110, meaning a 112-year-old would have roughly the same annual risk of death as a 110-year-old. This idea of a “mortality plateau” was influential enough to be built into actuarial tables used by insurance companies.
More recent analysis challenges this. A study examining supercentenarian mortality across different birth cohorts found that death rates after 110 continue to rise with age, following the same mathematical pattern (the Gompertz curve) that describes mortality at younger ages. For people born between 1884 and 1894, where the data was most robust, the rising-mortality model fit significantly better than the flat-mortality model. The results suggest that there is no biological safe harbor where aging simply stops accelerating, which poses a challenge to theories that predict the body reaches some kind of equilibrium at extreme ages.
For older birth cohorts (before 1885), where fewer verified cases existed and data was less reliable, the picture was murkier. Mortality appeared closer to flat, but the small sample sizes made it hard to draw firm conclusions either way.