Over at the Gerontology Research Group list, epidemiologist S. Jay Olshansky commented:
"It was quite a silly story. The authors misunderstood the evolutionary theory of senescence. Furthermore, they failed to account for other behavioral attributes of the folks being studied. I don't understand how that paper passed through peer review."
There are a lot of theories floating around regarding gender differences in longevity; that we cannot definitively say why the difference exists is a good example of the tremendous complexity of the intersection of metabolism, genetics, and aging:
For my money, I'd wager that their methodology for finding life spans in the genealogy data for the 81 out of 385 mentioned eunuchs (and/or the intrinsic structure of that data) is predisposed towards selecting longer-lived individuals.
I'm sure there needs to be considerable discussion of the methodology and conclusions of this paper, but in the mean time, it's going to be an useful paper to tweak people touting the health benefits of circumcision (based on research that is not all that indisputable either).
"Why cut off the tip and gain a few months of life expectation, if you could cut it ALL off and gain DECADES"
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[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 32.0 ms ] thread"It was quite a silly story. The authors misunderstood the evolutionary theory of senescence. Furthermore, they failed to account for other behavioral attributes of the folks being studied. I don't understand how that paper passed through peer review."
There are a lot of theories floating around regarding gender differences in longevity; that we cannot definitively say why the difference exists is a good example of the tremendous complexity of the intersection of metabolism, genetics, and aging:
https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=site%3Afightaging.org+...
But read the paper - it's open access:
http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822%2812...
For my money, I'd wager that their methodology for finding life spans in the genealogy data for the 81 out of 385 mentioned eunuchs (and/or the intrinsic structure of that data) is predisposed towards selecting longer-lived individuals.
Man, I sure hope so.
"Why cut off the tip and gain a few months of life expectation, if you could cut it ALL off and gain DECADES"
http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822%2812...
I am guessing there are confounding co-factors that make this research woefully inadequate and not useful.