Peer review post-mortem: how a flawed aging study was published in Nature

https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2016/12/09/how-weak-science-slipped-past-through-review-and-landed-in-a-top-journal-a1535637

by JoshTriplett • 10 years ago

55 10 10 years ago

pizza_boy• 10 years ago

Interesting writeup. We saw this coming on Publons: https://publons.com/p/518732/

mcguire• 10 years ago

"This has resulted in a fierce battle between different schools of thought. In one corner: demographer Jim Vaupel of Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Demographics. In the other: Jay Olshansky. “Propaganda”, was Vaupel’s verdict on the day that Evidence for a limit to human lifespan was published. “It all tells a very compelling story”, Jay Olshansky told the New York Times."

Welcome to scientific publishing. The only thing surprising here is "Demographic Day". How do you celebrate that?

By the way, here is the graphs from their previous article showing the basic problem:

https://images.nrc.nl/h5Sc3JoCu9fK3H1T4I3qWvfeDOU=/1920x/sma...

reasonattlm• 10 years ago

This seems like a tempest in a teacup, and a distraction from things that actually matter.

No-one in the scientific community, and certainly none of the people mentioned in the article, thinks that there is a limit to life span that cannot be overcome or changed through medical science. Olshansky is one of the principals of the Longevity Dividend initiative, for example, a group of researchers who want to slow aging and increase funding to the NIH for that goal. Vijg is on record a number of times over the years talking about slowing the aging process, and has collaborated with the SENS Research Foundation. Vaupel has long worked to popularize the concept of plasticity of aging in response to environment and medicine.

Aging is caused by a few distinct processes that are independent in the sense that removing one won't remove any of the others, and linked in the sense that each of them tends to speed up and make worse the consequences of the others. See the SENS outline or the Hallmarks of Aging paper for examples of categorization. It is perfectly possible for there to exist in these processes one that produces a very high rate of mortality at later age (100+) when it goes unaddressed. A very high rate of mortality looks a lot like a limit.

A good candidate for this process is the accumulation of transthyretin amyloid. This appears linked with mortality due to heart disease in younger old people (70-100), but only in 10% of cases based on analysis to date. Yet in supercentenarians, those 110 or older, transthyretin amyloidosis is the primary cause of death, based on the small number of autopsies carried out by those capable of such analysis. No presently available form of medicine does anything to reduce levels of this amyloid, and nor is there any presently available therapy that even aims at that goal.

However, there is a company, Pentraxin Therapeutics, that has a therapy capable of clearing this form of amyloid, somewhere in the glacial processes of Big Pharma development. Promising trial results were reported in 2015.

All aspects of aging are potentially modifiable and controllable, in the same way as any chronic disease state is given the technology to do it. That has absolutely nothing to do with present day demographics and whether or not we can talk about limits due to present mechanisms operating to produce aging. But I do think it is far more important than understanding the precise details of how aging arises and how mortality rates can be decomposed and assigned to specific components of aging.

veddox3• 10 years ago

This seems like a tempest in a teacup, and a distraction from things that actually matter.

The point of this article is not the aging debate. (And BTW, I don't think aging is as well understood as you seem to make out, but that is another discussion.) The point of this article is that a paper got published in one of the two most reputed science journals there are, and it was bogus.

Nature and Science are the two most trusted sources of scientific news there are - if we can't trust them, whom can we trust? I hope that this paper was just a one-time screw-up, because if not, we have a major problem on our hands as scientists. (As if we didn't have enough of those already...)

KKKKkkkk1• 10 years ago

Very nice investigation. The conclusion is golden:

Retract the article? If, as in this case, there is no question of scientific malpractice, that would be highly unusual. However, one or two critical responses may be added to Jan Vijg’s article. One such response is currently under peer review.

“I hope Nature accepts one of them,” says Vijg on the phone. Because then he’ll get to write a response. “And we’ll have another article in Nature.”

veddox3• 10 years ago

Yes, that last sentence especially left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. Unfortunately, with our current system of measuring prowess in science, I fully understand why he said it...

coldcode• 10 years ago

Sex sells, even in the scientific community. But I find studies based only on demographic calculations silly without some kind of reason why the data is the way it appears to be. If there is a limit what causes it? If there is no limit how can we know that? That there is a lady in Italy who just turned 117 is interesting but not meaningful to the question of lifespan.

veddox3• 10 years ago

But I find studies based only on demographic calculations silly without some kind of reason why the data is the way it appears to be.

Before you can explain a phenomenon, you first have to observe it. And if observing it is a major act in itself, then it is quite valid to publish observation and explanation separately. Perhaps it is even better to publish separately, because then you don't get data and interpretations mixed up.

trump2016• 10 years ago

There is no clock in our bodies.

Circadian rhythms? Telomeres shortening?

apathy• 10 years ago

More than those, but genetic and environmental variation in their "cycles" (if you will) as well as the stochastic events involved in turning them over seems to produce extremely wide variation in their eventual readings.

I work on senescence in adult stem cells, for whatever that's worth. We have found 72-year-olds whose viable fractions were greater than those of 26-year-olds, but as far as we can tell (with sample sizes in the dozens instead of dozens of thousands, this isn't going to be much), there aren't a ton of good predictors save chemo & radiation.

YMMV

Peer review post-mortem: how a flawed aging study was published in Nature

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