Survival after Age 80

Abstract
Manton and Vaupel (Nov. 2 issue)1 suggest that the white population of the United States has lower mortality between the ages of 80 and 100 years than the populations of Japan, Sweden, France, and England. They cite one of our papers as supporting the view that “published mortality rates are reasonably reliable for U.S. whites up to the age of 100.”1 The paper they cite does not assess the quality of U.S. data. Two other recent publications find U.S. data on mortality in old age to be seriously flawed.2,3