Long Live the Family. Families’ Exceptional Longevity in a Changing Disease Environment, Sweden, 1880-2015

Ingrid K van Dijk , Lund University
Niels van den Berg, Leiden University Medical Center

Which families are aging in exceptional health, and how do social characteristics of families with a high clustering of exceptional survival change over time? In this paper, we take a closer look at families in which a large share of ancestors (father, mother, aunts, uncles and grandparents) belonged to the 10% longest-lived of their birth cohort (van den Berg et al. 2020). We use a unique dataset consisting of digitized and linked historical records for a region in Southern Sweden, reconstructing lives and families of individuals living in five rural parishes 1812-1967 and the town of Landskrona 1904-1967, with nationwide follow-up in the Swedish national registers of these individuals and their descendants 1968-2015. We show evidence that descendants from families that have a large number of long-lived ancestors have a mortality advantage across time. This advantage existed even before the rise of the modern social gradient in mortality by socioeconomic status and is remarkably stable across time. We present some evidence that low-mortality families may have had a more beneficial lifestyle or profited from treatment options before the general population, but given lower mortality for a range of types of causes of death, these families also appear to have done better across the board.

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 Presented in Session 22. Longevity and Health