Alive on paper but dead in reality — why fewer people may be reaching advanced age (original) (raw)

Alive on paper but dead in reality — why fewer people may be reaching advanced age

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

Certain places in the world are known for having an unusual number of people who live very long lives. Researchers have paid a lot of attention to puzzling out what the secret is. Well, new work proposes some of it could be a result of clerical error or worse. Reporter Ari Daniel has more.

ARI DANIEL, BYLINE: Here's the crux of the problem - to tell how old someone is, you rely on their documents.

SAUL JUSTIN NEWMAN: There's no way to validate a human age against a physical measure.

DANIEL: Saul Justin Newman is a research fellow at Oxford University.

NEWMAN: If you go into a hospital without paperwork, there's no machine in there that says, oh, bing, you know, Ari is 38.

DANIEL: Yeah, I turned 38 a few years ago.

NEWMAN: So if you get consistently wrong errors in your paperwork, they're undetectable.

DANIEL: Newman's found that the errors connected to people ages 100 and above, called centenarians, are pretty much everywhere he's looked.

NEWMAN: Forty-two percent of centenarians in Costa Rica turned out to be lying in the census. At least 72% of the centenarians in Greece disappeared when they did an audit.

DANIEL: On paper, some of these folks were alive...

NEWMAN: ...But dead in reality. You know, I had a lady reach 103 in a freezer.

DANIEL: And this is where these errors may not be errors. To understand, Newman says to picture being jobless and broke and then your parent dies.

NEWMAN: And their pension check turns up the week after they're dead. All you have to do for that pension check to keep turning up in perpetuity is not register the death - very easy thing to get away with.

DANIEL: Newman says this is the reality that he's surfaced. The places on the planet that seem to have residents reaching super-advanced age are rife with pension fraud. Obscuring how old they were whenever they did pass away and not knowing how long people actually live has all sorts of ramifications.

NEWMAN: We're all the time using these old age data to estimate how many old people we're going to have to take care of, project how many hospitals we need in the future.

DANIEL: Newman's findings appear online and are awaiting formal peer review.

RAYA KHEIRBEK: It really is an important study because it pushes the field to scrutinize the data more rigorously, but the conclusions may overstate the extent of errors.

DANIEL: Raya Kheirbek wasn't involved in the research. She's chief of geriatrics at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. And while this work doesn't necessarily contradict thinking on longevity, she's concerned it could add complexity to an already nuanced field and that it may cast doubt on what she says is legitimate research, including a set of U.S. studies showing what people who do reach 100 have in common.

KHEIRBEK: This robust data does not depend on birth certificates, highlighting the significant role of genetic and environmental factors in longevity.

DANIEL: Factors such as diet, exercise and social engagement that Kheirbek says may contribute to longer living. But Saul Justin Newman worries it turns certain ways of life into a kind of mythology around how to reach a super-advanced age.

NEWMAN: Imagine, you know, you had the Hubble Space Telescope, and a percent of the stars turn out to be dust on the lens.

DANIEL: Newman says his hope is to just wipe down that lens.

For NPR News, I'm Ari Daniel.

(SOUNDBITE OF MAC MILLER SONG, "DANG!")

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