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Demographic analysis estimates high-age populations in England and Wales, highlighting reliability of methodologies.
Traditional methods of estimating the population at the oldest ages, such as censuses and household surveys, can be unreliable and prone to bias. At the UK National Statistical Institute, we use death registrations and a form of survivor ratio methodology, the Kannisto-Thatcher (KT) method, to distribute the population of those aged 90 years and over in England and Wales, by single year of age and sex.
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Coombs et al. (2026) studied this question.
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