In this issue of the Journal, Raya Kheirbeck and colleagues present an analyses of a birth cohort-specific (1910–1915) sample of US Veterans Administration-wide clinical data from community-dwelling deceased octogenarian (n≈ 31,000), nonagenarian (n≈ 52,000) and centenarian (n≈ 3,000) Veterans. 1 With 97% of the centenarian sample being male, this study is by far and away the largest descriptive study of male centenarians to-date.

Perhaps nowhere is the difference between male and female survival more significant than when observing survival to 100+ years. According to the 2005 US Social Security Administration’s birth cohort life tables2, for example, out of 100,000 people born in 1910, 3,795 were estimated to survive to 100 years old and older of which 14% were men and 86% were women. Figure 1 shows that the difference becomes even more pronounced for males and females surviving to age 105+ years, who for the 1910 birth cohort, for example, are comprised of 10% men and 90% women. Interestingly, new analyses reveal that with increasingly more recent birth cohorts, the life tables indicate that the relative proportion of men ages 100–104 years will steadily increase from 14% to 22% and for those 105+ years, their proportion will increase from 10% to 17%. This increase, if it is not some prediction artifact, would suggest some secular change (s) in health-related behaviors or environment that preferentially improves survival rates of men, compared to women, to these extreme ages.