Sardinia's longevity map has a new addition. It's Bolotana, in the province of Nuoro. Here, women over 70 are three times more likely than the national average to live past the age of 100.
This is what emerges from an international study involving, among others, the University of Sassari and the University of Illinois at Chicago and published in the journal Frontiers in Aging.
What drew researchers' attention to the municipality of Bolotana was its unusual concentration of centenarians: in 2024, there were six centenarians in a population of just over 2,000. Analysis of data from the municipal registry and parish registers allowed the team to map the population for an entire century and confirm that average life expectancy in the town is higher than in the rest of Italy. Women, however, have extraordinary values: at 70, they have an average life expectancy of another 21 years. Furthermore, those who reach 70 have a 13.8% chance of reaching 100. For comparison, the percentage in the rest of Italy is around 3.5%.
These data, according to the researchers' estimates, place the women of Bolotana immediately behind those of Hong Kong in the world ranking of female longevity.
“We think this is the longest-living female population in the world, or close to it,” said one of the study’s authors, S. Jay Olshansky, in a statement.
(Unioneonline)