During the entire twentieth century, mortality among the old declined about 1% per year, and the whole period has been a time of fairly regular increase in life expectancy (43, 62, 81). There have been some years of more rapid decline in old age mortality, such as from 1968 until the early 1980s, and years of slower decline, such as from 1954 to 1968 (10, 43). Even the last two decades have been a mixture of slower and more rapid periods of mortality decline for the older population (81). Compared to the 1970s, there was substantial slowing in the rate of mortality decline in the 1980s among.
