To my mind far too much effort is expended on trying to figure out the epidemiology of the tiny fraction of humans who manage to live a fair way past one hundred years of age. For one, there just aren't enough of them to generate truly robust data from which conclusions can be drawn. People are still arguing over the legitimacy of many of the cases, including Jeanne Calment. Gathering and vetting data on the age of very old people is inherently challenging in its own ways. As the authors of today's paper point out, we should be more suspicious than we are of claims of extreme longevity. You might compare their position with another recent discussion on this topic that presents similar conclusions - the quality of the data on ages of extremely old people just isn't great. But beyond legitimacy, small data sets naturally come with all sorts of other problems. The law of small numbers applies: a low number of data points tends to exhibit false trends that will vanish given more data points.

The more important issue here, however, is that this simply doesn't matter! It really is of little importance as to the statistics of how the small number of oldest humans age to death in the absence of rejuvenation therapies. It is unimportant because rejuvenation therapies will soon arrive in the clinic. The first experimental rejuvenation therapies worthy of the name are available now for the adventurous to try. It won't be long before near everyone who reaches old age will have undergone one or more forms of treatment to slow or reverse the progression of aging. The world of natural aging, in which there were no deliberate attempts to intervene in the mechanisms that cause aging, is soon to vanish. In this environment of rapid progress in biotechnology, the demographics of unmodified aging are of increasingly little importance. Instead, the focus must be on forging ahead with the development of rejuvenation biotechnology, the means to prevent and reverse the suffering and disease of aging.

Late-life mortality is underestimated because of data errors