The setting would be like something from a movie: healthy Mediterranean meals, strolls in the countryside, and an active social life, where old people exchange gossip while borrowing olive oil from their neighbors.

But according to Saul Justin Newman of the University of Oxford, UK, these blue zones may not be so “blue” after all. Newman’s work on the subject earned him the 2024 Ig Nobel Prize, awarded by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA, for research that first makes us laugh, then think.

Newman cites Okinawa in Japan, the elderly population of which was the subject of a Netflix documentary, as an example.

What’s more, rather than being the healthiest region, since 1975, Okinawa has consistently been ranked as having one of the worst diets in Japan, with low consumption of vegetables and heavy alcohol use.

This habit of overestimating lifespan has also been identified in other blue zones, such as Sardinia in Italy and Ikaria in Greece, where much of the data is also problematic.

Newman estimates that in some regions of Greece, more than 70 percent of supposed centenarians are dead, missing, or are simply cases of pension fraud.

Apparently, the secret to living to 100 in these locations is to not register a person’s death.

A similar phenomenon happens in countries you probably would not consider moving to for your retirement, according to a preprint article by Newman.

Distorted data

According to the United Nations (UN), Thailand and Malawi are the two countries with the highest rates of centenarians per number of inhabitants. They also both suffer many issues with social security fraud.

In these countries, birth certificates are no longer even considered legal documents.

Even in Greece and Italy, tens of thousands of “centenarians” continue to collect their pensions even though they are only alive on paper.

Life expectancy projections are used to plan public policies, set pension rates, and plan hospitals and nursing homes.

If this data is flawed, future health planning will also be flawed. This is a critical risk to a world that is only getting older.

But despite these statistical failings, one thing is certain: healthy eating, regular exercise, an active social life, and low financial stress are key to living a long and healthy life.

Biology doesn’t lie—these factors really do contribute to well-being and longevity.

What needs to be questioned is the statistics, not health.

While living in the hills of Italy or Greece does not guarantee immortality (as today’s billionaires hope), living a healthy and balanced lifestyle certainly gives us a better chance of enjoying many years of good health and happiness.

O post Where do centenarians live? apareceu primeiro em Science Arena.

The study, led by Jonas Schöley of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany, also showed that although the richest nations in Western Europe began to recover from the initial impact of the pandemic as early as 2021, the same was not seen in the east of the continent and the USA.

According to the survey, the only country in the sample not to undergo a net reduction in life expectancy between 2019 and 2021 was Norway. Between 2020 and 2021, 16 of the 29 nations maintained this negative trend while the rest started to change direction—interestingly, with the exception of Norway, which recorded a slight drop in life expectancy in 2021.

The study quantified the reduction in months. The most notable data for the entire pandemic so far (not including 2022) are from countries such as Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Poland, all in Eastern Europe.

Residents of these nations experienced life expectancy reductions of 43 months, 33.1 months, and 26.6 months respectively.

The situation was almost as dire for the US population, whose life expectancy dropped by 28.2 months between 2019 and 2021. In Western Europe, the worst decline was in Scotland (with a reduction of 9.6 months), while in Chile — the only Latin American country included in the study — the drop in life expectancy was 21.1 months, comparable to countries in Eastern and Central Europe.

According to Schöley and his colleagues, the coronavirus pandemic had a similar impact on Eastern European nations as the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when economic collapses and infrastructural losses severely affected public health.

These countries have followed a less favorable demographic trajectory than Western Europe since the 1960s, when life expectancy started to level off after decades of increases fostered by socialist governments placing a greater focus on public health.

The survey also identified which factors have been helping improve life expectancy since the worst waves of the pandemic and those that are leading to an even greater reduction.

On the negative side, being male is associated with further drops in life expectancy in 16 of the 29 countries analyzed. In these nations, the difference between men and women—almost universally favorable to women—has been made even bigger by COVID-19. The gap widened the most in the USA, increasing from women living an average of 5.72 years longer to 6.69.

Vaccination

On the positive side, countries that carried out more successful vaccination campaigns against the disease also tended to have recovered more by the end of 2021. As expected, the biggest contributing factor to the fall in life expectancy was the major increase in mortality rates among people aged 60 and over in almost all countries.

In the USA, however, the figures for 2021 were also significantly affected by higher mortality in adults under 60. The authors of the paper speculate that this could be linked to the relatively low proportion of people in this age group choosing to get vaccinated in the country compared to the high number of elderly Americans at immunization centers.

Data suggest that even with the improvements seen in 2021, COVID-19 remains the driving force behind the drop in life expectancy at an international level. The only event since the beginning of the twentieth century to have had a greater impact on life expectancy in a similar period of time was the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918–20.

O post Post-pandemic life expectancy apareceu primeiro em Science Arena.