Quantos são os centenários no Brasil? Uma estimativa indireta da população com 100 anos e mais com base no número de óbitos

The Brazilian population is rapidly aging. As a result, the number of centenarians has grown steadily over the last decades. According to IBGE, there were 13.865 and 24.476 centenarians of both sexes, respectively, in 1991 and 2000, representing an increase of 77 per cent in just nine years. Although expected, the increasing number of centenarians may be exaggerated by age misreporting at very old ages. In this article, we examine the consistency between the number of centenarians reported in the last two Brazilian censuses (1991 and 2000) and indirect estimates of this population calculated according to three methods: Extinct Generations, Rosenwaike (1968) and Coale & Caselli (1990). We find about four times more people in the census data than according to the indirect estimates. Uncertainty about the true size of old-age populations has important implications in data-deficient countries, particularly in the debate on adult mortality estimates.