To Whom It May Concern
[NOT A STUDY, an open letter signed by six named demographers. READ IN FULL AT SOURCE, complete with all seventeen references and all five signatory blocks] Pes, G., Rosero-Bixby, L., Chrysohoou, C., Stefanadis, C., Willcox, B. J., & Willcox, C. (2024). Open letter, 'To Whom It May Concern', October 2024, hosted at bluezones.com. SIGNATORIES IN THE ORDER THE LETTER PRINTS THEM, and no one of them may be promoted to sole author of it: Dr Gianni Pes, Dip. Medicina, Chirurgia e Farmacia, Universita di Sassari; Luis Rosero-Bixby, Centro Centroamericano de Poblacion, Universidad de Costa Rica; Christina Chrysohoou and Christodoulos Stefanadis, First Department of Cardiology, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens; Bradley J. Willcox, Professor and Director of Research, Department of Geriatric Medicine, John A. Burns School of Medicine, University of Hawaii, and Co-Principal Investigator, Okinawa Centenarian Study; Craig Willcox, University of Hawaii, Kuakini Medical Center and Okinawa International University. THE COUNTER-CASE AT FULL STRENGTH, WRITTEN BY THE PEOPLE WHO BUILT THE DATASETS. Definition: 'Blue zones are geographically defined areas where there is a disproportionately high number of nonagenarians and centenarians. They are in Okinawa, Japan, Ikaria, Greece, Ogliastra, Sardinia, and Nicoya, Costa Rica.' Their position: they object to 'Saul Newman's academically misleading and deeply flawed preprint papers, which have not been peer-reviewed by any scientist', and say Newman 'omits or misunderstands the rigorous age verification and statistical analysis involved in identifying blue zones'. THE PROCEDURE, in four steps: identify candidate high-longevity areas from public demographic databases, 'which may contain some errors'; accurately count the number of people BORN in the target area by sex and year of birth; identify individuals reaching a preset threshold age such as 90, 'regardless of residence'; calculate the ratio of long-livers to total recorded births in the same interval, an index that 'considers all individuals born in the target area, whether they are alive or deceased, and whether they have emigrated' and is 'designed to minimize the likelihood of false positives (type I errors)'; then determine age-specific mortality rates 'free of age-exaggeration bias'. THE SARDINIAN AUDIT TRAIL, the concrete and strongest part of the reply: every centenarian's age in the Blue Zone villages was double-checked against civil status databases back to 1866, handwritten ecclesiastical records consistently available from the seventeenth century onward, and a complete genealogical reconstruction of village inhabitants from 1866, with siblings' dates cross-checked, which 'allowed us to rule out any possible identity switches, such as the case of a false supercentenarian that was rigorously eliminated from our Sardinian centenarians' database'. In Nicoya the estimates rest on the Costa Rican civil registry established in 1883 rather than on self-reported ages, with immigrants and late-registered births excluded. THREE SPECIFIC REBUTTALS: that a finding about poor records in non-Blue-Zone areas is a false equivalence, because Blue Zone ages were validated individually; that age heaping does not appear in the validated Blue Zone data; and that using Sardinia-wide crime and poverty statistics to characterise the Blue Zone is a scale error, because the Sardinian Blue Zone is 'a small rural area of about 50,000 people spread across six mountain villages, whereas Sardinia as a whole has a population of 1.6 million'. ONE CONCESSION THEY VOLUNTEER: 'we have publicly acknowledged that Okinawa's longevity rates have declined with the arrival of modern diets and transportation.' AND THE ABSENCE THAT DECIDES THE ARTICLE'S QUESTION: IKIGAI APPEARS NOWHERE IN THE LETTER AND NOT ONE OF ITS SEVENTEEN REFERENCES IS ABOUT IT; they concern diet, telomere length, Amerindian ancestry, climate, neighbourhood design and cohort shift. The dispute between this letter and Newman's preprint is unresolved, neither document is the thing that would settle it, and the vault does not adjudicate it. All signatories are living and nothing adverse, personal, disputed or intent-laden is asserted about any of them.
[NOT A STUDY, an open letter signed by six named demographers. READ IN FULL AT SOURCE, complete with all seventeen references and all five signatory blocks] Pes, G., Rosero-Bixby, L., Chrysohoou, C., Stefanadis, C., Willcox, B. J., & Willcox, C. (2024). Open letter, 'To Whom It May Concern', October 2024, hosted at bluezones.com. SIGNATORIES IN THE ORDER THE LETTER PRINTS THEM, and no one of them may be promoted to sole author of it: Dr Gianni Pes, Dip. Medicina, Chirurgia e Farmacia, Universita di Sassari; Luis Rosero-Bixby, Centro Centroamericano de Poblacion, Universidad de Costa Rica; Christina Chrysohoou and Christodoulos Stefanadis, First Department of Cardiology, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens; Bradley J. Willcox, Professor and Director of Research, Department of Geriatric Medicine, John A. Burns School of Medicine, University of Hawaii, and Co-Principal Investigator, Okinawa Centenarian Study; Craig Willcox, University of Hawaii, Kuakini Medical Center and Okinawa International University. THE COUNTER-CASE AT FULL STRENGTH, WRITTEN BY THE PEOPLE WHO BUILT THE DATASETS. Definition: 'Blue zones are geographically defined areas where there is a disproportionately high number of nonagenarians and centenarians. They are in Okinawa, Japan, Ikaria, Greece, Ogliastra, Sardinia, and Nicoya, Costa Rica.' Their position: they object to 'Saul Newman's academically misleading and deeply flawed preprint papers, which have not been peer-reviewed by any scientist', and say Newman 'omits or misunderstands the rigorous age verification and statistical analysis involved in identifying blue zones'. THE PROCEDURE, in four steps: identify candidate high-longevity areas from public demographic databases, 'which may contain some errors'; accurately count the number of people BORN in the target area by sex and year of birth; identify individuals reaching a preset threshold age such as 90, 'regardless of residence'; calculate the ratio of long-livers to total recorded births in the same interval, an index that 'considers all individuals born in the target area, whether they are alive or deceased, and whether they have emigrated' and is 'designed to minimize the likelihood of false positives (type I errors)'; then determine age-specific mortality rates 'free of age-exaggeration bias'. THE SARDINIAN AUDIT TRAIL, the concrete and strongest part of the reply: every centenarian's age in the Blue Zone villages was double-checked against civil status databases back to 1866, handwritten ecclesiastical records consistently available from the seventeenth century onward, and a complete genealogical reconstruction of village inhabitants from 1866, with siblings' dates cross-checked, which 'allowed us to rule out any possible identity switches, such as the case of a false supercentenarian that was rigorously eliminated from our Sardinian centenarians' database'. In Nicoya the estimates rest on the Costa Rican civil registry established in 1883 rather than on self-reported ages, with immigrants and late-registered births excluded. THREE SPECIFIC REBUTTALS: that a finding about poor records in non-Blue-Zone areas is a false equivalence, because Blue Zone ages were validated individually; that age heaping does not appear in the validated Blue Zone data; and that using Sardinia-wide crime and poverty statistics to characterise the Blue Zone is a scale error, because the Sardinian Blue Zone is 'a small rural area of about 50,000 people spread across six mountain villages, whereas Sardinia as a whole has a population of 1.6 million'. ONE CONCESSION THEY VOLUNTEER: 'we have publicly acknowledged that Okinawa's longevity rates have declined with the arrival of modern diets and transportation.' AND THE ABSENCE THAT DECIDES THE ARTICLE'S QUESTION: IKIGAI APPEARS NOWHERE IN THE LETTER AND NOT ONE OF ITS SEVENTEEN REFERENCES IS ABOUT IT; they concern diet, telomere length, Amerindian ancestry, climate, neighbourhood design and cohort shift. The dispute between this letter and Newman's preprint is unresolved, neither document is the thing that would settle it, and the vault does not adjudicate it. All signatories are living and nothing adverse, personal, disputed or intent-laden is asserted about any of them.
Written from the nOT A STUDY, an open letter signed by six named demographers. READ IN FULL AT SOURCE, complete with all seventeen references and all five signatory blocks.
What our sources record
Recorded when this source was checked, figures included, with page references and quotation marks removed.
October 2024. https://www.bluezones.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Demographers-Statement-10.2024.pdf