1 in 6000 is Centenarian - Dr Thomas Perls, elder stats man - The Boston Globe

Dr. Thomas Perls is an elder stats man - The Boston Globe:
Mar 23, 2009 2009 Globe Newspaper Company
Retrieved from http://www.boston.com/news/health/articles/2009/03/23/elder_stats_man/

"When I first started studying centenarians in 1994, they were rare. There were about 1 per 10,000 in the US population. Now it's easy to find them. It's 1 per 6,000."


"Over 90 percent of them are functionally independent well into their 90s, despite the fact that many of them had age-related diseases. Their ability to cope with diseases was phenomenal. We want to understand the underlying mechanism of that so other people can do the same thing."