Regions where many people live past a hundred have drawn enormous attention, with explanations about diet, social ties and genes. One researcher examined an entirely different variable: the quality of . What did he find?
Curiosity counts. Here is the answer.
The absence of orderly birth registration. When states in the United States began issuing birth certificates, the number of people recorded as 110 and over fell by sixty-nine to eighty-two per cent. The proposed reading is that a reported extreme age sometimes rests on an error in the records, on a confusion between generations, or on fraud around pensions. The caveat is heavy: this is a manuscript circulated before peer review, longevity researchers dispute some of the conclusions, and well-documented cases do exist.
Missing paperwork predicts extreme age. In the United States the absence of registration was and a strong predictor of reaching 110. When a state began issuing birth certificates, the number of people counted as fell sharply. Their birth dates clustered suspiciously on days divisible by five. And the famous turned out to be poor areas, with lower literacy and life expectancy than their own country’s average.
To check a claim about age you can go looking for documents, which is slow work. The approach here is the reverse: instead of verifying cases, ask what predicts that someone will be recorded as 110 years old. If the best predictor is not diet or genetics but the quality of the records, that tells a story about the data rather than about longevity. Reaching 110 is thousands of times rarer than reaching a hundred, so a handful of bad files can fill the whole list.
In the United States this could be tested almost like a natural experiment, because each state introduced birth certificates in a different year. The finding was sharp: after the introduction, the number of 110-year-olds in that state fell by 69 to 82 per cent. No change in health happens at that rate.
A second sign came from the birth dates themselves. They clustered unusually on days divisible by five. Someone who remembers approximately tends to round, so a pattern like that is a classic signature of memory or of invention, not of real births.
The contested part is the generalization to the longevity regions. The claim is that they are marked by low income, low literacy and life expectancy below their own national average. Worth remembering too is the status of the document: a manuscript circulated before peer review, with longevity researchers disputing some of the conclusions.
wat. When states in the United States introduced birth certificates, the number of 110-year-olds fell by 69 to 82 per cent.
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If a large share of the records comes from errors and forgeries, the explanations built on them, from diets to ways of living, rest on shaky data.
How do we know?
An analysis of longevity records against the availability of birth and death registration, literacy rates, income and crime, in the United States and in regions considered longevity hotspots.
What is still unknown
This is a manuscript circulated before peer review. Longevity researchers dispute some of the conclusions, and it contains no case-by-case verification.
Learn something?
Ig Nobel Prize 2024 · Demography
“for detective work to discover that many of the people famous for having the longest lives lived in places that had lousy birth-and-death recordkeeping.”
Where to next
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