Cancer Mortality at Very Old Ages

Background: Mortality rates of all malignant neoplastic diseases combined and of most individual kinds of cancer increase with age through most of the human life span. What happens to cancer mortality rates near the end of the life span has not been described previously. People age 85 years and older are commonly considered as a single category; however information is available for cancer mortality of patients older than 85 years in 4 age groups, each covering 5-year spans.

Methods: Age-stratified mortality rates of all of the patients with malignant neoplasms combined and of cancers of several sites in 5-year age groups from 50 to more than 100 were calculated from United States vital statistics and Census data from 1990.

Results: Mortality rates of all of the patients with malignant neoplastic diseases combined and of cancers of most individual sites peak between ages of 80 and 100 years, and decline after ages older than those. Although mortality rates generally increase with age, the relative frequency of cancer deaths declines with age from nearly 40% of all deaths between ages of 50 and 69 years, to 4% of all deaths in patients older than age 100 years.

Conclusions: People who survive to ages approaching 100 years are relatively resistant to the causes of death, including cancer, of the majority of people who die at younger ages. The basis of this resistance to cancer may be attributable to several recognized genetically controlled steps in the pathogenesis of cancer.