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hubie [soylentnews.org] writes:

One of the most recent Ig Nobel winners [soylentnews.org] 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 [theconversation.com]:

I started getting interested in this topic when I debunked [plos.org] a couple of papers [nih.gov] 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 [netflix.com], 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 [bbc.co.uk] 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.

[...] Regions where people most often reach 100-110 years old are the ones where there's the most pressure to commit pension fraud, and they also have the worst records. For example, the best place to reach 105 in England is Tower Hamlets. It has more 105-year-olds than all of the rich places in England put together. It's closely followed by downtown Manchester, Liverpool and Hull. Yet these places have the lowest frequency of 90-year-olds and are rated by the UK as the worst places to be an old person.

[...] Longevity is very likely tied to wealth. Rich people do lots of exercise, have low stress and eat well. I just put out a preprint [medrxiv.org] analysing the last 72 years of UN data on mortality. The places consistently reaching 100 at the highest rates according to the UN are Thailand, Malawi, Western Sahara (which doesn't have a government) and Puerto Rico, where birth certificates were cancelled completely as a legal document in 2010 because they were so full of pension fraud. This data is just rotten from the inside out.

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

I hope so. But even if not, at least the general public will laugh and think about it, even if the scientific community is still a bit prickly and defensive. If they don't acknowledge their errors in my lifetime, I guess I'll just get someone to pretend I'm still alive until that changes.

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