Sun, Aug-11-19, 08:40
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Senior Member
Posts: 1,898
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Plan: Atkins-ish (hypoglycemia)
Stats: 000/000/000
BF:
Progress: 50%
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Quote:
"Supercentenarians and the oldest-old are concentrated into regions with no birth certificates and short lifespans."
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v1
It looked at "new predictors" of supercentenarian status in various regions around the world, including the United States and the aforementioned Blue Zones. What'd they find?
Red wine consumption didn't predict supercentenarianism.
Legume consumption didn't predict it.
The presence of hills didn't predict it.
It turns out that a strong predictor of super-longevity is the absence of detailed birth records.
In the United States, whenever a state introduced birth certificates, supercentenarianism miraculously dropped by 69-82%. A full 82% of all supercentenarians on record in the U.S. were "born" before birth certificates were used. Only 18% have birth certificates; only 18% of American supercentenarians can actually be verified. Oops.
In Okinawa, Sardinia, and Ikaria, the strongest predictor for regions with high reported supercentenarianism was high crime, low income, and low life expectancy relative to the national average. Ninety-nine percent of male Italian centenarians smoke. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese centenarians are actually dead or missing. These aren't what you'd expect. Oops again.
The conclusion of the paper is that the primary causes of reported supercentenarianism in these countries are pension fraud and reporting error.
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This really doesn't surprise me at all.
My own MIL wasn't sure of her actual birth year. I'm not sure why this was, but I always suspected she must have lied about her age at some point in her life, and decades later (I think it was when she applied for social security), couldn't remember which year she was actually born. The county/town where her birth was recorded had lost all their records in a fire decades earlier (this happened long before there were such things as state-wide databases for birth records), and neither of her older sisters could remember exactly which year MIL was born either. (They did finally agree on a year that they thought must have been the year she was born)
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