More people are living to be over 100, and medical experts believe end-of-life care needs to be tailored to fit the frailty of these individuals.
Many of the centenarians who passed away in England in recent years died from pneumonia, a King's College London news release reported.
The researchers believe that "boosting care home capacity and planning health services" could help improve the quality of life of these individuals, the news release reported.
In 2011 there were about 300,000 centenarians in the world, but they are expected to reach three million by the year 2050. Providing the best care for this growing group is essential.
Centenarians receive little attention in clinical studies. To remedy this the researchers looked at the time and place of death in 35,867 centenarians in England between the years of 2001 and 2010 and compared the results with people who died in their 80s and 90s.
Over the ten-year study period over 60 percent of the centenarians passed away in a nursing home, a quarter died in the hospital, and a tenth died at home.
"Old age" was the most common cause of death at 28 percent followed by: "pneumonia (18 percent) and other respiratory diseases (six percent); stroke (10 percent); heart disease (nine percent) and other circulatory diseases (10 percent); dementia and Alzheimer's disease (six percent); and cancer (four percent)," the news release reported.
In the group of 80 to eighty-five year-olds heart disease was the cause of death 18 percent of the time.
"Centenarians have outlived death from chronic illness, but they are a group living with increasing frailty and vulnerability to pneumonia and other poor health outcomes. We need to plan for health care services that meet the 'hidden needs' of this group, who may decline rapidly if they succumb to an infection or pneumonia. We need to boost high quality care home capacity and responsive primary and community health services to enable people to remain in a comfortable, familiar environment in their last months of life," Doctor Catherine Evans, Clinical Lecturer in Palliative Care at the Cicely Saunders Institute, King's College London said in the news release.
"Compared to other European countries the proportion of people aged 90 years and over dying in hospital in England is high, and the number dying in care homes is low. For example, in the Netherlands and Finland more than three-quarters of people aged over 90 die in a long-term care setting such as a nursing home; far fewer die in hospital," she said.
