Many of the 'Oldest' People in the World May Not Be as Old as We Think (vox.com) 52
We've long been obsessed with the super-elderly. How do some people make it to 100 or even 110 years old? Why do some regions -- say, Sardinia, Italy, or Okinawa, Japan -- produce dozens of these "supercentenarians" while other regions produce none? Is it genetics? Diet? Environmental factors? Long walks at dawn? From a report: A new working paper released on bioRxiv, the open access site for prepublication biology papers, appears to have cleared up the mystery once and for all: It's none of the above. Instead, it looks like the majority of the supercentenarians (people who've reached the age of 110) in the United States are engaged in -- intentional or unintentional -- exaggeration. The paper, by Saul Justin Newman of the Biological Data Science Institute at Australian National University, looked at something we often don't give a second thought to: the state of official record-keeping. Across the United States, the state recording of vital information -- that is, reliable, accurate state record-keeping surrounding new births -- was introduced in different states at different times. A century ago, many states didn't have very good record-keeping in place. But that changed gradually over time in different places.
Newman looks at the introduction of birth certificates in various states and finds that "the state-specific introduction of birth certificates is associated with a 69-82% fall in the number of supercentenarian records." In other words, as soon as a state starts keeping good records of when people are born, there's a 69 to 82 percent fall in the number of people who live to the age of 110. That suggests that of every 10 supposed supercentenarians, seven or eight of them are actually younger than that, but we just don't know it because of poor record-keeping.
Newman looks at the introduction of birth certificates in various states and finds that "the state-specific introduction of birth certificates is associated with a 69-82% fall in the number of supercentenarian records." In other words, as soon as a state starts keeping good records of when people are born, there's a 69 to 82 percent fall in the number of people who live to the age of 110. That suggests that of every 10 supposed supercentenarians, seven or eight of them are actually younger than that, but we just don't know it because of poor record-keeping.
Count the rings (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Count the rings (Score:5, Funny)
You don't have to cut them open, that's barbaric. You can just get a sample using a coring bit.
Duh (Score:3)
Duh.
Next you'll repost the old news about how a bunch of the super old Japanese people have been dead for years, but the family kept quiet so they could keep getting that check.
Incentivize anything, and... (Score:3)
Heh heh... It's rumored that this may not be entirely a Japanese phenomenon. There's a local where we used to reside who actually became his father for purposes of check-cashing and tradesman license usage.
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Meanwhile, I know several people that insist no one would EVER abuse things for free money. The ones that would do it are very rare and almost a myth.
My most recent memory of this is a friend of mine has a super feminist wife. After they lived in Sweden for 3 years for his job (she's 31 and has yet to work a job for more than 2-3 months in her life, yet baulks at the idea that she can't just be put in a super important position of great influence... claims it's because she's a woman) and she was super ex
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Meanwhile, I know several people that insist no one would EVER abuse things for free money. The ones that would do it are very rare and almost a myth.
From TFA:
Similarly, supercentenarians are extremely rare. Only about one in 1,000 people who live to the age of 100 make it to 110. The vast majority of people would never impersonate their parent or older sibling for benefits, or forge a birth certificate, or participate in identity theft, or get confused about how old they even are. But if one in 1,000 people would do that, then fraudulent supercentenarians will be more common than bona fide supercentenarians. When you’re looking at an exceptionally rare phenomenon, you have to be exceptionally careful — or you’ll mostly find yourself studying something else entirely.
Yes, this kind of fraud is incredibly rare.
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I don't think it's quite that cut and dried. FWIW, I'm a supporter of social welfare safety nets that assist the poorest of us, and prevent the starvation and homelessness of their innocent offspring, even if that includes a good bit of fraud.
Poor people have limited options, overall, and are prone to exploit the few optioons they do have. Entitlement programs are rife with recipients who exaggerate claims for benefits to maximize the additional free income, or receive some form of assistance: For example [wikipedia.org]
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I am surprised that there are still people in the US who think that the small tax break you get for having children is enough to pay for the children. Ie, I know someone from the deep south who decided with her husband that they didn't want kids. Yet her relatives told her that she's missing out on the free government money.
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I am surprised that there are still people in the US who think that the small tax break you get for having children is enough to pay for the children-
- her relatives told her that she's missing out on the free government money.
Same. I remember telling someone else about this story, and their response was "Yeah well they already get the equivalent of that payment in tax breaks." Uhh.... not quite?
Also my comment was more centered on "People in America would abuse the shit out of this" versus everyone would. Lower view of people in this country, I guess.
Re:Duh (Score:5, Interesting)
In the 1970s, there was a yogurt fad, because the people living in the the valleys of the Caucasus Mountains ate yogurt everyday and many of were way over 100 years old.
But it turned out they were all centenarians because they had falsified their birth records to avoid conscription into the Russian Army during the First World War.
Re:Duh (Score:5, Funny)
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I think a lot of it is probably guesswork too. As you go back a lot of people were very uneducated. Many couldn't read and only had basic math skills.
Doing genealogy research for my family once you get back into the 1800's or even early 1900's you see some interesting stuff. You'll see a family where a kid is recorded in one census as being 6 . . . and in the next census 10 years later the same kid is recorded at 14. Then if you can find their death certificate when they do pass many decades later the bi
Birth Certificates Cause Cancer (Score:5, Funny)
> "the state-specific introduction of birth certificates is associated with a 69-82% fall in the number of supercentenarian records."
Obviously birth certificates are killing people.
Re:Birth Certificates Cause Cancer (Score:4, Insightful)
Not nearly as many as were killed by social security numbers. When the IRS began requiring taxpayers to obtain and report SSNs for dependent children, several million suddenly disappeared.
Re:Birth Certificates Cause Cancer (Score:4, Funny)
Obviously birth certificates are killing people.
Correlation is not causation. It's obviously the death certificates that are actually killing people. If we stop signing those people will stop dying.
Idiotic "paper" (Score:5, Interesting)
Out of curiosity, because my mother comes from the island of Ikaria mentioned, I quickly read through the relative parts. This is definitely not a "research paper" of any kind. For example, it starts with the abstract:
Finally, the designated ‘blue zones’ of Sardinia, Okinawa, and Ikaria corresponded to regions with low incomes, low literacy, high crime rate and short life expectancy relative to their national average.
Quite strange, as the specific island of Ikaria, apart from not having short life expectancy, it is famous for being completely crime free, to the point where you have a bakery with no shopkeeper - you just go in, take the bread, leave money, get change etc. As 10 year old kids we would walk alone in the night across a dark forrest from one village to the other, hitchhike to the beach - it is one of the few places where you can still safely hitchhike. Sure enough, if you read on there is no mention again about crime rates in regards to Ikaria, the only mention of the island is from a some dubious paper with a quote that says:
Chrysohoou et al. observed that the oldest-old have: a below-median wage in over 95-98% of cases, moderate to high alcohol consumption (5.1-8.0 L/ year), a 10% illiteracy rate...
And draws the conclusion that these factors cannot lead to a high life expectancy somehow. This is utterly ridiculous, the oldest Ikarians are farmers who grew up at the first half of the 20th century in Ikaria. By definition they are not well educated and of below-median wage. The alcohol consumption is even more ludicrous, even assuming the max 8L/year means pure alcohol, that means a glass of wine per day (if it is not pure alcohol but just alcoholic drink, it is just 1 glass per week). While we no longer think 1 glass of wine per day helps you (although Ikarian wine specifically has not been studied), we also think its negative effect can be negligible at such a quantity.
And I can just share the secret of at least some Ikarians living a long life, it is quite simple: Apart from the balanced Mediterranean diet which you can find in many other places, people there have ZERO worries. Especially when it comes to time. If you visit and like punctuality they may drive you crazy, but they always take their time and manage to not get into arguments at the same time. No stress, longer life, easy.
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You misunderstood. It doesn't say that people in those areas don't live long lives, it just says that they aren't as old as they claim due to poor recordkeeping. And also, the UK scientist was recently murdered on Ikaria, did you miss that in the news?: https://www.theguardian.com/wo... [theguardian.com]. So um, not so "crime free".
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Nothing in that article suggests she was murdered - by all appearances she lost her footing while exercising, fell into the ravine, and hit her head.
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You suck at reading comprehension, don't you? The British scientist was not murdered, she was climbing and the boulder detached. Very sad, but not a crime.
Also, the article in regards to Ikaria specifically it doesn't say anything about poor record keeping, it just goes on and on about the Italian data being suspect. So it uses an example and applies it to all areas. I mean, even there on the abstract it applies a generic statement to all areas:
As such, relative poverty and short lifespan constitute unexpected predictors of centenarian and supercentenarian status, and support a primary role of fraud and error in generating remarkable human age records.
Short lifespan is never again mentioned in relation to most of
how completely 2019 (Score:2)
This is a very contemporary take - don't like the statistics? They must be fake.
Now I know how Chief Bromden felt, lost in the fog.
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This is a very contemporary take - don't like the statistics? They must be fake.
Now I know how Chief Bromden felt, lost in the fog.
It is, as you say, very suspiciously contemporary, to discount evidence that flies in the face of one's settled belief set. Yet, a tiny bit of cognitive dissonance is triggered when the longevity champions of the contest for postponement of death are all from places where birth records are more than a bit shady.
"Nurse Ratched, can I have my cigarettes?"
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What's wrong with that as evidence? Seems pretty convincing.
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When it comes down to it, people like their myths and their stories.
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The study found two main contributors. The larger contributor was poor record keeping. To give an example of just how bad this record keeping was and how much it contributes to the problem, it is estimated roughly one-third of the population of the United States did not have a birth certificate as of the year 1941. Working in factories that produced goods for the war effort required you to be a citizen and many were turned away for failing to be able to prove it. The more robust birth registration was only
Supercentenarians (Score:2)
Coming soon to a theater near you.
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peak capeshit confirmed
Wait, are you telling me... (Score:2)
Re:Wait, are you telling me... (Score:4, Funny)
We can't bust heads like we used to, but we have our ways. One trick is to tell 'em stories that don't go anywhere - like the time I caught the ferry over to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for my shoe, so, I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. "Give me five bees for a quarter," you'd say.
Now where were we? Oh yeah: the important thing was I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn't have white onions because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones...
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Or fraud (Score:5, Informative)
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I would think 99.99% would remember what decade they were born and raised in so even if the birth records are wrong it's still fraud by deception. There's also the potential for swapping deaths, elderly relative dies but we pretend it's a younger relative so the younger can retire early and collect the elder's pension. Either because the family pulls a scam or the doctor issuing the death certificate is corrupt. Those who reach record breaking age get a lot of scrutiny but like your friend's grandma reachin
Inverse correlation McDonalds proliferation? (Score:2)
I'd like to see that stat as well.. Probably a pretty linear graph.
Lunar Calendar, too (Score:2)
My wife, who is Asian, has an official birthday of 29-October, because, well, in the lunar calendar it's "month 10, day 29," which in the year of her birth was her "real" birthday in early December of our unified, global calendar. So for the next 100 years or so, we'll have to explain to everyone, including our daughter, that despite all official documentation, mommy's birthday is December xx rather than what the records indicate.
(And of course, there's an exact date in December, that if I specified, would
Re: Lunar Calendar, too (Score:1)
Re: Lunar Calendar, too (Score:1)
perhaps (Score:2)
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That would affect everyone, not just people who are over 100.
Generally, I think most people do actually know their birth date and age.
The implication of TFS isn't that they don't know their birth date. It's that they're lying about it to appear older.
You know what this means... (Score:2)
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So where are we talking about? (Score:1)
Federal census records (Score:3)
Census records become available to the public 70 years after the census. That's good authentication that someone already existed in a census year. Bypasses any distrust in state-level records.
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Can't be. (Score:2)
Most of the people older than 100 are women. Do you know a woman that voluntarily says she's older than she really is?
i'm more than 2000 years old (Score:2)
no point in hiding it anymore, so i'll just right out say it; i'm more then 2000 years old.
i was around when jesus christ had his moment of doubt and pain...
Baptismal records (Score:3)
Possibly more accurate than government records in the given time frame.
Response from Blue Zones founder (Score:1)
"appears to have cleared up the mystery once and for all"
Or not: https://www.bluezones.com/news... [bluezones.com]
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More Common Than you Think. (Score:2)
My Mother was born in Eastern Oklahoma in the 1940s.
She didn't have a birth certificate till the 1960s.
There was no actual birth record made because she wasn't born in a hospital.
Universal birth records didn't full exist most places till quite recently even in the United States.
Depends (Score:2)
We have 104 year old subjects in some of our trials.
Healthy people who make it to 80, tend to have a good chance of living to 100. And more.
That's ok (Score:2)