‘The data on extreme human aging is rotten from the inside,’ says longevity expert

From the swimming habits of dead trout to the discovery that some mammals can breathe through their butts, a group of leading scientists from left field take a bow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during the 34th annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony. Not to be confused with the real Nobel Prizes, the Ig Nobels are awarded for scientific discoveries that “make people laugh and then make them think.”

We caught up with one of this year’s winners, Saul Justin Newman, a senior research fellow at the University College London Centre for Longitudinal Studies, whose research has shown that most of the claims about people living past 105 are wrong.

How did you find out about your award?

I picked up the phone after struggling through traffic and rain to a guy from Cambridge, UK. He told me about this award and the first thing that came to mind was a woman who collected mucus from whales and a levitating frog. I said, “I absolutely want to be in that club.”

What was the ceremony like?

The ceremony was wonderful. It’s a bit of fun in a big, elegant room. It’s like you’ve taken the most serious ceremony possible and made fun of every aspect of it.

But is your job really incredibly serious?

I became interested in this topic after I debunked a few Nature and Science papers on extreme aging in the 2010s. Generally, claims about how long people live are mostly wrong. I tracked down 80% of the world’s 110+ year-olds (the other 20% come from countries that can’t be analyzed sensibly). Of these, almost none have a birth certificate. There are more than 500 in the US; seven have a birth certificate. Worse, only about 10% have a death certificate.

The epitome of this is the Blue Zones, regions where people supposedly reach 100 at an extraordinary rate. They’ve been promoted to the public for almost 20 years. They’re the subject of numerous scientific papers, a popular Netflix documentary, a bunch of cookbooks on things like the Mediterranean diet, and so on.

Okinawa, Japan is one such zone. A 2010 Japanese government survey found that 82% of people over the age of 100 in Japan were dead. The secret to living to 110 was to not register your death.

The Japanese government conducted one of the largest nutritional surveys in the world, dating back to 1975. From then until today, Okinawans have had the worst health in Japan. They ate the least vegetables; they drank the most.

What about other places?

The same goes for all the other blue zones. Eurostat tracks life expectancy in Sardinia, the Italian blue zone, and Ikaria in Greece. When the agency started keeping records in 1990, Sardinia had the 51st highest life expectancy at old age in Europe out of 128 regions, and Ikaria was 109th. It’s amazing what cognitive dissonance there is. In the case of the Greeks, by my estimate, at least 72% of centenarians are dead, missing, or basically pension fraud cases.

What do you think explains most of the incorrect data?

It varies. In Okinawa, the best predictor of where the centenarians are is where the Americans bombed the registry halls during the war. This happens for two reasons. If a person dies, they remain on the books of some other national registry that has not confirmed their death. Or if they live, they go to an occupying government that doesn’t speak their language, works by a different calendar, and messes up their age.

According to the Greek minister who distributes pensions, more than 9,000 people over the age of 100 have died while receiving a pension. In Italy in 1997, some 30,000 “living” pension recipients were reported dead.

The areas where people are most likely to live to 100-110 are the ones with the greatest pressure to commit pension fraud, and also have the worst outcomes. For example, the best place in England to live to 105 is Tower Hamlets. It has more 105-year-olds than all the wealthy places in England combined. It is closely followed by Manchester city centre, Liverpool and Hull. However, these places have the lowest incidence of 90-year-olds and are rated by the UK as the worst places to be old.

The world’s oldest man, John Tinniswood, who is said to be 112 years old, comes from a very dangerous part of Liverpool. The simplest explanation is that someone at some point wrote down his age incorrectly.

However, most people do not lose track of their age…

You’d be amazed. Looking at the UK Biobank data, even middle-aged people routinely don’t remember how old they are, or how old they were when they had children. Similar statistics are in the US.

What does all this mean for human longevity?

The question is so clouded by fraud, error, and wishful thinking that we simply don’t know. The clear way out of this situation is for physicists to engage in a measure of human age that does not depend on documents. We can then use this to build metrics that help us measure human age.

Life expectancy data is used to predict future life expectancy, and that’s used to set retirement rates for everyone. We’re talking about trillions of dollars in retirement money. If the data is garbage, then so are these predictions. It also means that we’re spending the wrong amount of money planning for hospitals that will take care of the elderly in the future. Your insurance premiums are based on these things.

What is your best hypothesis about actual human longevity?

Longevity is most likely linked to wealth. Rich people exercise a lot, have low stress levels, and eat well. I just published a preliminary analysis of the last 72 years of UN mortality data. The places where the mortality rate consistently reaches 100% according to the UN are Thailand, Malawi, Western Sahara (which has no government), and Puerto Rico, where birth certificates were completely canceled as a legal document in 2010 because they were riddled with pension fraud. This data is just rotten from the inside out.

Do you think the Ig Nobel will make your science taken more seriously?

I hope so. But even if not, at least the general public will be laughing and thinking about it, even if the scientific community is still a bit touchy and defensive. If they won’t own up to their mistakes while I’m alive, I guess I’ll just have someone pretend I’m still alive until that changes.

Saul Justin Newman, Research Associate, Center for Longitudinal Studies, University of California

This article is reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.