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Notification
« Making bad choices, again | Main | Applied Statistics - Jim Greiner »
1 February 2007
A Rash Of Senicide?
There have been an awful lot of stories lately about the world's oldest person dying; in fact, it seems to have happened about three times in the last month or so. Then again, being the world's oldest person is a dubious honour to be sure, since the winner isn't likely to hold the title for very long and likely isn't even aware of their status. (Full disclosure: my great-grandmother was a centenarian but likely never knew my name.)
These stories have been bouncing in my mind lately and I'm trying to figure out why. I can think of a few scientifically relevant explanations:
1) The life expectancy of a centenarian is on the order of a year, and three successive deaths in a month is a rare event; conditioned on the first one, assuming independence and exponential life span (a reasonable assumption for the tail end), the probability of the next two events coming within a month is roughly 0.0033. And this happened to be the month for it.
2) The events aren't at all rare, and the centenarian death rate is actually dramatically higher, but it's a slow news month, and the stories themselves are floating to the top of the pile.
3) Online news services like Reuters and CNN have dedicated spaces for more `entertaining' and `bizarre' news stories, meaning that no matter how much news there is, people are seeing these stories.
4) Guinness sales are down, despite the "brilliant!" advertising campaign, and the World Record people are seeking out these changing events for the sake of their own discreet advertising.
5) I read this in The Onion and the satire hit me point blank, meaning I'm selecting and remembering the stories more often when they appear.
I'm thinking it's Number 5, but I'd be curious to know if anyone knew the mean centenarian death rate and whether this was a rare occurrence or not.
Posted by Andrew C. Thomas at February 1, 2007 9:56 AM
Comments
The musing about the lack of quality of life for a centenarian, even a supercentenarian (age 110 and older) is unfortunate. In fact, to live to 100 requires a relative slow rate of aging and a compression of disability towards the end of one's life. Especially in the case of people surviving to age 110 (there are about 60 of them in the USA, maybe 200-300 world wide), these individuals are usually doing quite well, even independently up through age 105. Indeed most are very frail at 110 and older, but I would ask them about their quality of life before damning their exisitence.
Sincerely
Tom Perls MD, MPH HSPH'93
Director, New England Centenarian Study
Posted by: Tom Perls MD, MPH at February 2, 2007 8:02 AM
I made some minor edits to the post to remove a couple of unfortunate choices of words. And I do hope that the quality of life for most centenarians is higher than that experienced by my great-grandmother in the last 15 years of her life.
Posted by: Andrew C. Thomas at February 2, 2007 9:02 AM