704080v3.full.pdf

bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/704080; this version posted March 14, 2024. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under...

bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/704080; this version posted March 14, 2024. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. Supercentenarian and remarkable age records exhibit patterns indicative of clerical errors and pension fraud Saul Justin Newman*1,2 5 1 Leverhulme Center for Demographic Science, Nuffield Department of Population Health, University of Oxford 2 University College, University of Oxford ORCID 0000-0001-9841-1518 * 10 Correspondence to: [email protected] Abstract The observation of individuals attaining remarkable ages, and their concentration into geographic 15 sub-regions or ‘blue zones’, has generated considerable scientific interest. Proposed drivers of remarkable longevity include high vegetable intake, strong social connections, and genetic markers. Here, we reveal new predictors of remarkable longevity and ‘supercentenarian’ status. In the United States, supercentenarian status is predicted by the absence of vital registration. The state-specific introduction of birth certificates is associated with a 69-82% fall in the number of 20 supercentenarian records. In Italy, England, and France, which have more uniform vital registration, remarkable longevity is instead predicted by poverty, low per capita incomes, shorter life expectancy, higher crime rates, worse health, higher deprivation, fewer 90+ year olds, and residence in remote, overseas, and colonial territories. In England and France, higher old-age poverty rates alone predict more than half of the regional variation in attaining a remarkable age. 25 Only 18% of ‘exhaustively’ validated supercentenarians have a birth certificate, falling to zero percent in the USA, and supercentenarian birthdates are concentrated on days divisible by five: a pattern indicative of widespread fraud and error. 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. As such, relative poverty and short 30 lifespan constitute unexpected predictors of centenarian and supercentenarian status and support a primary role of fraud and error in generating remarkable human age records. 1  bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/704080; this version posted March 14, 2024. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. Introduction The concentration of remarkable-aged individuals within geographic regions or ‘blue zones’ 35 has stimulated diverse efforts to understand factors driving survival patterns in these populations[2,3]. Both the overall population residing within these regions, and the individuals exceeding remarkable age cut-offs, have been subject to extensive analysis of lifestyle patterns[2,4–6], social connections[3,7], biomarkers[8,9], and genomic variants, under the assumption that these represent potential drivers behind the attainment of remarkable age. 40 However, alternative explanations for the distribution of remarkable age records appear to have been overlooked. Previous work has noted the potential of population illiteracy or heterogeneity to explain remarkable age patterns. Other investigations have revealed the potential role of errors[13–16], bad data, and operator biases in generating old-age data 45 and survival patterns. In turn, these findings prompted a response with potentially disruptive implications: that, under such models, the majority if not all remarkable age records may be errors. There is a theoretical reason to expect that most or all old-age records are errors[13,15]. 50 Consider, for example, a population of fifty-year-olds into which we introduce a vanishingly low rate of random, undetectable age-coding errors. These rare errors involve taking a forty-year-old, and making their documents state they are now fifty years old. The 40-year-old ‘young liar’ errors will have over double the annual survival rate of the (error- free) 50-year-old population. They are, after all, biologically 10 years younger. As the ‘young 55 liar’ errors are more likely to survive than the error-free data, age-coding errors constitute an exponentially larger fraction of the population over time. Eventually, this exponential growth overtakes the population and, even from a vanishingly low baseline error rates of (say) 0.001%, the entire population becomes ‘young liar’ errors at advanced ages. Of course, the baseline error rate in most populations is not vanishingly low. The USA, which has more 60 supercentenarian records than any other country, exhibits historical error rates of 17%-66%[20– 23], even in the general population. 2  bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/704080; this version posted March 14, 2024. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. Here, we explore the possibility that extreme old-age data are dominated by age-coding errors by linking civil registration rates and indicators of poverty to per-capita estimates of remarkable age 65 attainment, obtained from central population registries and validated supercentenarian databases, across the USA, France, Japan, England, and Italy. These data reveal that remarkable age attainment is predicted by indicators of error and fraud, including illiteracy, poverty, high crime rates, short average lifespans, and the absence of birth 70 certificates. As a result, these findings raise serious questions about the validity of an extensive body of research based on the remarkable reported ages of populations and individuals. Such concerns were sufficiently serious that an extensive review was conducted, revealing evidence that brings into question key findings, widespread research practices, and the basic 75 level of integrity in the field (Supplementary Materials). 3  bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/704080; this version posted March 14, 2024. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. Methods 80 The number and birthplace of all validated supercentenarians (individuals attaining 110 years of age) and semisupercentenarians (SSCs; individuals attaining 105 years of age) were downloaded from the Gerontology Research Group or GRG supercentenarian table (updated 2017) and the International Database on Longevity or IDL. These data were aggregated by subnational units for birth locations, which were provided for the IDL data, and obtained through 85 biographical research for the GRG data. Populations were excluded due to incomplete subnational birthplace records (