Odds - Married Couple Over 100

[dannyk]

Hey,

Hope this is the right sub forum for this topic.

Chatting with a work colleague yesterday and he shared that his parents who are still married are both over 100 years old. I’ve never encountered this and started thinking about the odds of this.

Based on 1% of the US population living to be over 100 I think that picking two people at random who both live to over 100 would be 1 in 10000. I have no idea how to then incorporate the fact the the two people are also married. Statistics isn’t my strong point! Does anyone have any thoughts on how to quantify how rare this is?

Thx,
Graeme


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[Loren Pechtel]

Hey,

Hope this is the right sub forum for this topic.

Chatting with a work colleague yesterday and he shared that his parents who are still married are both over 100 years old. I’ve never encountered this and started thinking about the odds of this.

Based on 1% of the US population living to be over 100 I think that picking two people at random who both live to over 100 would be 1 in 10000. I have no idea how to then incorporate the fact the the two people are also married. Statistics isn’t my strong point! Does anyone have any thoughts on how to quantify how rare this is?

Thx,
Graeme


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Whether they are married or not has no bearing on the math you set up.

However, it most certainly is relevant because life expectancy between married partners isn't independent. People tend to marry others who will make similar lifestyle choices and the loss of one's partner matters to the life expectancy of the survivor. AFIAK we do not have good data on the size of either of these effects so the odds are not currently knowable.

Note, also, the fact that they are married at all is also relevant--life expectancy includes infant mortality. (The abysmal life expectancy numbers you see for ancient times don't really mean most people died at that point, but rather that many died as babies. If all adults live to 100 but 80% of babies die in their first year you would have a life expectancy of 20 years even though nobody died at age 20.)

(While this table is on a company website it's official government data, this is just the first place I found it.)
http://personal.fidelity.com/products/retirement/inheritedira/lifeexptable.html

Life expectancy at birth: 82.4 years. Since you said married, though: Median age of first marriage in the US: 27.9. As the table only goes by years make this 28. At 28 your remaining life expectancy is 55.3. Added to the 28 that produces an overall life expectancy of 83.3--you've gained almost a year because you aren't one of the ones that didn't make it to marriage age in the first place.