Here’s the panicky headline: “Long periods of extreme heat can accelerate biological age, scientists say”.
Longer periods of extreme heat has been found to accelerate biological age in older adults by up to two years, according to new research.
More heat days over time correlated with deterioration at the molecular and cellular level in adults 56 years or older, likely because the biological deterioration accumulates over time and eventually leads to disease and disability, Eunyoung Choi, a postdoctoral associate at the University of California’s Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, told ABC News.
The peer-reviewed paper is “Ambient outdoor heat and accelerated epigenetic aging among older adults in the US” by Eunyoung Choi and Jennifer Ailshire in Science Advances. They collected blood and measured temperatures where donors lived, with up to a 6-year lag, and used “Multilevel regression models are used to predict PCPhenoAge acceleration, PCGrimAge acceleration, and DunedinPACE.” That’s the terms they used in the abstract.
They have maps scientifically demonstrating that, say, Florida is hotter than, say, Michigan. Think of that. They busted out heat days by “caution” levels and some other rigmarole, then crammed the lot into “multilevel regression models”. Those models had coefficients related to aging items, like that “PCPhenoAge acceleration” and so on. The higher the coefficient, the greater temperature was said to accelerate aging in years. Zero means no effect. Here’s the main picture:
That’s a screenshot, and is blurry for whatever reason. Go to the paper to see the original. Know that “BC day” is blood collection day. Passing by PhenoAge, the effects only started with temperatures from 1 to 6 years ago. But with PhenoAge there was a steady effect of about 1 years’ aging—and pay close attention here—starting from blood collection day. This is absurd.
If you aged a year, phenotypically for every hot day today, and also aged a year for hot days 7 days ago, and also aged a year for hot days 30 days ago, and also aged a year for hot days 60 days ago, and also aged two or three years for hot days one year ago, and also aged two or three years for hot days six years ago, you’d be dead by the end of summer.
Either that or PhenoAge isn’t related to real age and is merely a statistical artifact, the result of needlessly complicated models.
None of this makes sense. Especially that bizarre jump at 1 and 6 years. Either temperature takes years to sink into the core of marrow and do its dirty deeds to blood, or temperature now does little, but it always works 1 or 6 years ago. This is stranger, too, because 6 years ago keeps changing. Every year it was a new 6 years ago, and a new 1 year ago, but these mysteriously keep effecting the blood.
Deep into the discussion, they signal that maybe not all is right with their model: “The short-term physiological effects of heat stress might not be stable and may last only a few days.” Which means you don’t age a year on a hot day? Never mind.
If there is truth that heat is aging people faster people in, say, Singapore, which is hot all year round, should be dropping dead at earlier ages than those in, say, Finland, which is the opposite of hot all year round. Here’s a picture of the life expectancy in Singapore, and also Malaysia (also hot) and Hong Kong (not cold; all from Google, which automatically added those other countries):
Here’s one from Finland (cold), but also Denmark (cool) and Greece (hot):
You can see the dip over the years of the covid panic in all countries. But recall, we’re told that every year, year upon year, is the “hottest year evah”, with many saying the number of hot-hot days are increasing, again year on year.
But as temperatures increase (if they do), so does life expectancy! Which means, if we do statistics in the manner of Choi and Ailshire, that “climate change” is making people live longer! Woo-hoo!
Incidentally, since they did this “research” in the USA, it helps to know the CDC tracks life expectancy by state, both at birth (how many years on average people live) and at 65 (how many years the average person lives after reaching 65). Here are the numbers for 2020.
Hawaii, the hottest state on average all year round, with averages around 70 in the coldest months, and near 90 in the summers, had the highest life expectancy (80.7 years), and highest at 65 (21 years).
Michigan, which I can personally attest is damn cold, ranks 36 at birth (76 years) and also 36 at 65 (17.8 years). Whereas hot-hot-hot Florida ranks 19th at birth (77.5 years), soaring to number 6 at 65 (19.2 years).
The signal is the same: if you want to live longer, move to where it’s hot when you’re 65. Thanks, “climate change”!
It took about 15 minutes to check all these numbers. I don’t know how long it took Choi and Ailshire to do their regressions.
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Be interesting to feed their names into data_republican’s database and see what falls out.
Don’t see any contact info so I’ll just post it here even though not relevant to this particular article, but in your wheelhouse.
CATO recently ran an article espousing “private company vaccination requirements”. They cited a study claiming that requiring vaccinations of employees reduced nursing home deaths. https://www.nber.org/papers/w33072
Here was the abstract quote that caught my eye and made me wonder, given the number of articles I’ve read here:
“implementing a vaccine mandate led to large increases in staff vaccinations at mandate facilities, which directly led to less transmission of and lower patient mortality from COVID. We estimate that vaccine mandates saved one patient life for every two facilities that enacted a mandate, ”
If it’s worth analyzing the study, I figure you’re the guy to do it. If not, no worries.
Factor to consider: Florida has a significant number of old folks who immigrated. They then start riding bicycles, walking, getting lots of sun, relaxing, etc. The old folks in Venice, Florida, where I live, seem pretty happy about life here. I’m 90 and have lived here for 20 years.
umm… does it make sense to ask whether yearly climate variability affects lifespans? Michigan, for example, is very hot and humid in summer and can be very cold and dry in winter – where Hawaii is pretty much the same year round.
Warmer Is Better Rational#473: people live longer in warm climes! Absoheatinglutely. Correlation IS causation. Ha! I knew it all along. Take that, Logic Man.
It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity
I live near Loma Linda, California, where temperatures are normally 90 degrees F. or higher at least six months per year, and over 100 on most days June through September. This is nothing new–historic records indicate it has been thus at least since white people settled there in the 19th century. Loma Linda has the highest population of centenarians in the U.S., and the average life span there is eighty-nine for men and ninety-one for women.
I wonder if climate change bothers some people so much it actually shortens their lifespans.
Someone should fund that study.
Worrying about Climate Change Kills more People than the actual Climate.
Johnno: Folks should worry more about the climate they will have after they die.
I just love “models” that use only outside ‘official’ temperatures to gauge health…
I worked for a year in a US Steel plant. There are many job duties in a steel plant where temperatures are far hotter than 95° F, where one works as long as they can before taking a break in outside temperatures that actually are in the 95° F range.
It is simply astonishing how cold 95° F feels when your work environment exceeds 115° F and sometimes is in the 130° F range.
I don’t see any interest in a person’s work environment or even their actual daily temperature conditions…
I’m sure many of the researchers involved only experienced outdoor temperatures for very brief periods as they moved from one climate controlled location to another climate controlled location.
But then, I am highly skeptical of any public life expectancy since wars or actual pandemics have serious repercussions on average life expectancy…
And yes, I agree when research is unable to show short term health impacts until they hit some mystical 6 years or longer impact sure looks like artificial artifacts in their data collection or manipulation.
My last time in a hospital, from a skin infection, where staff worried that I had a flesh eating bacterial infection. Along with the hospital lab losing test results preventing infection identification for days, (days 1 through 3).
The most experienced doctor the hospital brought in had the staff install a PIC line because clumsy nurses ruined so many of my excellent veins through their under the skin probing with their needles.
There were five doctors involved in my diagnosis with 3 of them disappearing by day 2.
A PIC line allowed the nurses to easily draw my blood any time they desired.
On their third attempt to identify my infection, they finally narrowed the infection down to a common ordinary staph infection, which the experienced doctor suspected from the beginning of day 2, when he got involved. He had changed my antibiotic injections to treat an ordinary infection, which subsequently cleared up by day 4.
A cure that curiously occurred the same day they managed to finally identify the infection.
To take this a little further, I get blood tests every 3 to 6 months depending upon doctor decisions.
For several years, I consistently went to a ‘convenient’ laboratory that left one arm or the other severely bruised by incompetent needle placement. Sometimes they bruised both arms leaving me to explain to my doctor why my arms were so bruised.
By simple coincidence due to getting a cat scan, I used a different lab. My arm was normal afterwards with a very slight mark where the needle entered. I’ve used that lab since with similar results through several doctor appointments.
There is a complication though, my doctor doesn’t get all of my blood tests (paper) from the second lab by my appointment because they aren’t electronically linked. Where the first lab is electronically linked to my doctor.
I wonder how much changing one’s blood test source is an impact? Since I don’t think I’ve ever consistently used the same blood test laboratory for long, i.e., longer than a few years.
There is no place that has consistent long term blood test results for me in one file or even under a consistent name…
Heresolong: “implementing a vaccine mandate led to large increases in staff vaccinations at mandate facilities, which directly led to less transmission of and lower patient mortality from COVID. We estimate that vaccine mandates saved one patient life for every two facilities that enacted a mandate,”
One of the key discoveries is that CDC and NIH claims that COVID-19 vaccination prevented COVID disease transmission is completely false. COVID-19 vaccination utterly failed to prevent disease transmission.
A nagging thought of mine is that I seriously detest generic assumptions in what is supposed to be neutral research, e.g., “vaccine mandate led to large increases in staff vaccinations at mandate facilities, which directly led to less transmission of and lower patient mortality from COVID”.
NIH VAER’s data only shows this because NIH banned non-anaphylaxis COVID data inputs.
Yet, data collected by independent researchers shows this “less transmission” and “lower patient mortality” claims are false.
When research claims to prove what cannot be found in the data, there are far too many “We estimate” estimates and gross assumptions in their research.
Protection from COVID-19 disease itself has been proven false, people who are multiply vaccinated and boosted are shown to be much more susceptible to COVID-19 infection. Many vaccinated/boosted persons have caught COVID-19 multiple times, e.g., Fauci himself.