Gender differences on the mortality pattern on causes of death in Spain: recent signs of change

Juan Manuel García González, Universidad Internacional de La Rioja
Rosa Gomez-Redondo, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED)
Aina Faus Bertomeu, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED)

Recent decades have witnessed the rise of a new and growing demographic group: the old people. This remarkable historical phenomenon is the direct result of an increase in survival rates, with more and more men and women celebrating their 85th birthdays every year. As death rates fall and people live longer, the frequency distribution of age at death has shifted towards the more advanced groups, affecting a greater proportion of the population as a whole while the maximum lifespan has continued to rise. It should be emphasized that, although the number of octogenarians in wealthy countries grew over the course of the twentieth century, paralleled by a rise in the age of death among the very old. In the case of Spain, this trend did not happen until the 1970s. This paper analyzes the impact of mortality and the evolution of the main causes of death among Spanish old people. Special attention is paid to variations in trends regarding to gender during last three decades. Regarding to the differential mortality and the evolution between men and women, signs of change are looked for the most relevant causes of death. Our work has considered three different age groups: 65-79; 80-89 and 90 and more years old, to distinguish the diversity of trends among the old people. This research has also profited from the increase in the availability of official data on both mortality and living population at advanced ages in recent years, which allows a research more updated.