The allure of extreme longevity has beckoned for centuries. Research careers and marketing campaigns have been built on the idea that we can live longer, healthier lives by emulating long-lived people. It is a comforting thought, frequently used for research funding bids and to sell cookbooks.
Unfortunately, the data on people living to an unusually old age is deeply flawed. I tracked down data on 80 percent of the world’s people 110 or older and found that in many cases their advanced age is highly improbable. The errors in the data were striking.
The oldest man ever recorded, Jiroemon Kimura from Japan, has three birthdays: One is fudged, one is a typo, and one is supposedly true. He was validated as the oldest man in 2012 by Guinness World Records.
Juan Pérez, a recent record-holder for oldest living man, was born in a notorious Venezuelan cocaine-growing jungle, where, according to news reports, he had no identification until he was 54. He faced a legal dispute over identity theft and was held up by President Nicolás Maduro as an example of communistic health superiority. His milestone was placed in the record books with all the rest.
Jeanne Calment, supposedly the oldest woman who ever lived, smoked for about 100 years. She burned many of her personal papers when she moved into a nursing home. When it came time to validate her case, demographers argued that she was well known enough in her town that it would have been hard for her case to be one of stolen identity. And when it came to the smoking, the demographers said she “possibly did not inhale at all.” Like many others, her case is questionable.
Errors and anomalies do not stop at individual cases; they permeate extreme-age research.
Many of the world’s oldest people are reported to be alive on paper long after they died. The first man to “survive” past 110 actually died at 65, and nobody noticed the mistake for a century. Tokyo’s oldest man was really entombed in his apartment for 30 years while his family took his pension. Japanese people incinerated by American World War II bombings have “survived” for decades in a filing cabinet as administrative zombies, their cultural practices appropriated by Westerners to sell books on their supposed survival secrets like ikigai, the Japanese concept of finding purpose in life, and the purported health benefits of purple sweet potatoes.
Even countries with long histories of record keeping have data problems. Italians who supposedly lived notably long lives have later been discovered deceased in freezers, under Sicilian gardens and entombed in Neapolitan walls, even as someone continues to collect their pension checks. Seven thousand centenarian Greeks sent their families remittances from the grave, while food bloggers have trumpeted their olive groves as the secret of survival.
My work also undermines the popular concept of blue zones, or regions of the world where people claim to live longer and healthier lifestyles and regularly live past 100. Blue zones were discovered by demographers from 2004 to 2009 in Nicoya in Costa Rica, Okinawa in Japan, Ikaria in Greece, Sardinia in Italy and Loma Linda, Calif., where there is a Seventh-day Adventist community.
Blue zone researchers claim that they thoroughly vet each potential location. But if you look at records from the regions, problems arise. Greece lost thousands of centenarians, a large fraction of the total, to a pension-fraud audit. In 2010 some 82 percent of Japanese centenarians, over 230,000 people, were discovered to be missing or dead. One in eight people in the United States thought to be 100 years old have records that show conflicting or unconfirmed official ages; that number goes up to one in three at 109 or older. When I looked at Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data for the census tracts for Loma Linda, I found that the life expectancy there was ordinary. In fact, on average, residents of 23 to 75 percent of American neighborhoods live longer than those in Loma Linda neighborhoods.
The longstanding concept of blue zones suggests that people reach age 100 in these areas by doing small amounts of exercise, eating mild vegetarian diets in moderation, attending religious services and living with family as they drink and socialize with friends. Yet independent data reveals otherwise.
Okinawa is the hallmark case. Okinawans are overwhelmingly atheist, have extremely high rates of divorce and have double the poverty rate of the national average. In government surveys, Okinawans ate copious quantities of meat for decades and had the highest male body mass index since 1975 compared with other prefectures’. Two demographers involved in blue zone research even acknowledged that Okinawa’s mortality rate now is unremarkable. While they cite generational differences to explain this fact, they admit there could have been flaws in the initial reports of extreme longevity. I find that explanation quite likely.
But revealing these patterns has not led to a broad reckoning in longevity science. Too often demographers have doubled down, and the goal posts have been carefully moved. The blue zone popularizer Dan Buettner admitted how he discovered Loma Linda: not by examination of global survival data but because his National Geographic editor told him, “You need to find America’s blue zone.” He has also talked about Singapore as a sixth blue zone, even though a former collaborator of his has expressed skepticism. The Okinawan, Sardinian and Costa Rican blue zones simply shifted or disappeared when the data and criticism arrived.
The blue zones are, however, just a symptom of a bigger research problem.
Governments have sent the United Nations their best population data for decades, typically compiled by leading demographers. Analyzing this data to identify regions with the highest survival rates from ages 80 to over 100 reveals huge anomalies. Across 236 countries and territories, Malawi, Western Sahara and Puerto Rico were routinely ranked in the top 10 places in the world for reaching age 100. Malawi is poorer than North Korea. Western Sahara doesn’t have its own government. Puerto Rico suffered so much pension fraud and identity theft that it canceled birth certificates in 2010 and restarted the system from scratch. That these places have exceptionally high later-life survival makes no sense at all, except as the outcome of systematic errors.
Age is perhaps the most important predictor of human health, yet we lack a system that could provide independent verification, instead relying on paper records that are prone to error and identity theft. When demographers say they have validated a person’s age, often what they mean is that they have merely cross-checked documents — and, of course, those documents could be wrong.
These findings raise much bigger questions about how false claims about longevity and supercentenarians could persist for so long. Too few people in academia or among the general public have questioned how a man with no identifying documents living in a Venezuelan jungle could outlive every athlete, rich Swiss mountaineer and yogurt-slurping weekend warrior on Earth.
The issues surrounding claims of extreme longevity are certainly no secret to the field of demography, to be sure, which is why efforts to corroborate such claims exist. However, these efforts are built on inadequate methods. Cases are routinely validated, passing the most stringent tests available, only to be discovered to be false decades later. New tests are needed, or no progress will be made.
After years of open criticism, basic problems remain unexplained. Instead, the science of extreme longevity continues as an immense joke.
The post Sorry, No Secret to Life Is Going to Make You Live to 110 appeared first on New York Times.
