When Does Human Longevity Start?: Demarcation of the Boundaries for Human Longevity

Interestingness:5

By Natalia S. Gavrilova and Leonid A. Gavrilov. Journal of Anti-Aging Medicine. June 2001, 4(2): 115-124. doi:10.1089/10945450152466161.

More Gavrilovs.  This one is another paper where they continue to extract results from the historical records of the european aristocracy from the 1600s onwards. In this one, they focus on the period 1800-1880s so as to have complete data for women (recent records are more complete) but also to make sure everyone in it is dead.

They analyse longevity of 5800 daughters that made it to adulthood (30 years) compared to longevity of their mothers and fathers (separately). They avoid sons due to frequent military deaths. They find almost no correlation if the mother died before 85 years of age, but strong correlation otherwise, with a line of best fit with a slope of 0.412±0.204.  Similarly for the father, with no correlation if he died before 75 years of age, but a strong correlation with a slope of 0.236±0.078 otherwise. They don't show results with a combined mother plus father variable. The graphs are quite nice.

There's something somewhat dodgy about the method since they were looking for a piecewise linear regression, and they determined where to start the significant line by inspecting the graph visually. I don't know how much that detracts from the result.

Like they mention, this does "resolve" the contradictions found where some research says that the genetic component of longevity is small, while others show that people with very old age are bunched in families.