Supercentenarians might be younger than they seem (By Patricia Toro, MD MPH)

June 25, 2024

Humans have been looking for the “fountain of youth” for centuries. The popular press is full of articles that promote lifestyle changes to significantly increase lifespan. Entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, with his Blueprint protocol, has spent millions trying to reverse the impact of aging on his own body and has built a “Don’t Die” community.

The Blue Zones project identified five communities across the globe with apparently long lifespans. Their researchers identified 9 habits that these communities had in common, including having a glass of wine (or two) with friends or family each day!

A pre-print article (i.e., not yet peer reviewed) published this spring suggests that inaccurate records might be more responsible for supercentenarians (individuals over 110 years of age) than healthy living. This article highlights some alternative explanations for these high proportions of 100+ year old citizens, namely:

• Limited or no birth certificates – which may be due to wars/disruptions or poor/limited standardization of birth records at the local level.

• Outright fraud, as evidenced by birthdates in supercentenarians concentrated on the first of the month or days divisible by five.

  • Most pension schemes require the recipient to be alive, and longer life spans seem to correlate with communities with lower income; this is the opposite of what we see in other longevity data where wealthier communities have, on average, longer lifespans.

• Accumulation of documentation and data tracking errors over time, which can lead to a specific community seeming to have a large (comparatively) proportion of individuals 110 years or older. For instance, those whose age is miscoded in youth appear to live far longer than those whose birthdates are correctly noted and thus become a progressively larger portion of the older population over time.

• A selective view or misreading of locally available data by Dan Buettner and his team –

  • For example, the Sardinian Blue Zone currently occupies the 34-44^th percentile in the European Union for old-age (85+) longevity, not the highest (i.e., 99^th percentile). We might expect it to be higher if it has community pockets that live these longer lifespans.

  • Okinawa, another Blue Zone, has Japan’s 2^nd highest per capita intake of beer and the highest per-capita intake of KFC, the highest child poverty rate, the highest poverty rate, and the worst average BMI of all 47 prefectures in Japan. The per capita intake of Spam is 14 cans/year for each Okinawan, perhaps not the heart-healthy diet that leads to supercentenarians!

If you like podcasts, Freakonomics has a great recent episode on this.

Implications for employers:

• Diet and lifestyle can certainly improve health and longevity – although perhaps not as much as we would hope.

• Wellness programs and efforts can meaningfully contribute to employees’ health but might not expand lifespan or longevity as promoted by some vendors.

• Social determinants are key factors in health and longevity and can be influenced, sometimes strongly, by lifestyle factors. Employers should continue to focus on the factors that are the most impactful and are operationally within their purview.

Thanks for reading.  You can find previous posts in the Employer Coverage archive

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Illustration by Dall-E

Wednesday: Impact of race-based lung function algorithm