Study: You're Going to Keep Aging Until You Die.

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▼ Once you reach a very advanced age, you reach a sort of "aging plateau," according to some experts in aging. You get so old that your aging slows down. This idea is reasonably widely held, or at least taken seriously. But a new study suggests it could be result of a statistical error.
Here's how the theory of the aging plateau works: You continue to spend more years on Earth, but your body stops getting  meaningfully older, or at least the rate at which it gets older slows down. Researchers call this effect "late-life mortality deceleration" or "LLMD."
Scientists began to wonder whether an aging plateau exists after studying the odds of dying during each specific year of life. When people reach the age of 90, it seems they're much more likely to die that year than they were at 75. But the odds of a person dying the year they turn 105, assuming they reach 105, aren't too much higher than they were when they turned 90. The very-very old and the very-very-very old are all more likely to die soon, but it's not clear whether the very-very-very oldare much more at risk than the merely very-very old.
At least, that's what scientists thought.
Now, a new paper published yesterday (Dec. 20) in the journal PLOS Biologysuggests that this whole notion of an aging plateau is wrong — and instead, it's the result of a repeated statistical error. Researcher Saul Justin Newman found that a series of mistakes in the way aging data is collected and interpreted could explain most, if not all, of the evidence for an aging plateau in humans.
Newman told Live Science that most researchers who study aging accept the plateau as a given, even though there isn't a single agreed-upon biological explanation for why it might happen.
The problem, his paper argues, is that the evidence for the plateau is based on the assumption that ages are reported correctly to the databases researchers use. But some of those ages are probably entered incorrectly, Newman asserts. Seventy-five-year-olds could accidentally turn up in the database as 85-year-olds, and 98-year-olds could turn up as 84-year-olds.
But there are a lot more 75-year-olds who could get accidentally marked as older than there 98-year-olds who might get accidentally marked as younger. That means that the average senior has a better chance of being recorded as having died at an older age than they really were, rather than younger than they really were.
Newman found that just a handful of mis-recorded ages of death in a database could wildly skew the results, accounting for a large proportion of the error. (▪ ▪ ▪)

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