‘The Data on Extreme Human Ageing is Rotten From the Inside Out’ – Says Ig Nobel Winner

hubie writes:

One of the most recent Ig Nobel winners that caught my eye was: Saul Justin Newman, for detective work in discovering that many of the people famous for having the longest lives lived in places that had lousy birth-and-death recordkeeping. He found that almost all data on the reported oldest people in the world are staggeringly wrong, as high as 82% incorrect, and he says, "If equivalent rates of fake data were discovered in any other field... a major scandal would ensue. In demography, however, such revelations seem to barely mention citation."

The Conversation also picked up on this and interviewed him about it:

I started getting interested in this topic when I debunked a couple of papers in Nature and Science about extreme ageing in the 2010s. In general, the claims about how long people are living mostly don't stack up. I've tracked down 80% of the people aged over 110 in the world (the other 20% are from countries you can't meaningfully analyse). Of those, almost none have a birth certificate. In the US there are over 500 of these people; seven have a birth certificate. Even worse, only about 10% have a death certificate.

The epitome of this is blue zones, which are regions where people supposedly reach age 100 at a remarkable rate. For almost 20 years, they have been marketed to the public. They're the subject of tons of scientific work, a popular Netflix documentary, tons of cookbooks about things like the Mediterranean diet, and so on.

Okinawa in Japan is one of these zones. There was a Japanese government review in 2010, which found that 82% of the people aged over 100 in Japan turned out to be dead. The secret to living to 110 was, don't register your death.

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