The paper, originally published online last July by the journal Science, analyzed the genes of centenarians and found genetic markers that appeared to be unusually strong predictors of whether a person was likely to live a very long life.
But outside researchers raised serious questions about the methods used in the study, problems first reported last year by Newsweek. A statement from Science said yesterday that there was no misconduct by the researchers but that once technical and quality-control problems had been addressed, the resubmitted data would not merit publication in the journal.
The research emerged from BU’s noted New England Centenarian Study.
The study began in 1995 as a population-based study of all centenarians living within 8 towns in the Boston area. The prevalence of Alzheimer’s Disease and other dementias in centenarians was the focus. At the time, the prevalence of centenarians in industrialized countries was approximately one centenarian per 10,000 people in the population. Thus, at any one time, we were studying approximately 46 centenarians within a total population of 460,000 people (2). The NECS has gone on to enroll centenarians from throughout the United States and other countries and has grown to be the largest comprehensive study of centenarians in the world.
Dr. Perls is also one of the authors of a book entitled Living to 100: Lessons in Living to Your Maximum Potential At Any Age
A 2004 New York Times Sunday Magazine story on longevity profiled study particiapants.
Ten years ago, Tom Perls, director of the New England Centenarian Study at the Boston University School of Medicine, started researching the lives and habits of centenarians, trying to determine the key to their unusual longevity. Although Perls’s research confirms that behaviors like exercising and avoiding smoking are likely to improve health at any age, his work also makes a strong case for a genetic component to longevity. Male siblings of centenarians, he explains, are 18 times as likely as other men born around the same time to live to 100. Female siblings are 8.5 times as likely as other females born around the same time to do so.
Today, the authors are officially retracting the paper, acknowledging that the original analysis was flawed. The team, led by Paola Sebastiani, a biostatistician at Boston University School of Public Health in Massachusetts, and Thomas Perls, a gerontologist at Boston University School of Medicine, collaborated with an outside laboratory to identify and remove affected data, and used a different genotyping platform to confirm their results. Ultimately, the reanalysis yielded a new set of genetic variations that might contribute to extreme longevity.
“However,” the authors wrote in their retraction, “the specific details of the new analysis change substantially from those originally published online to the point of becoming a new report. Therefore, we retract the original manuscript and will pursue alternative publication of the new findings.”
The incident could haunt the work of others who are searching for the genetic underpinnings of longevity, says Thomas Kirkwood, director of the Institute for Ageing and Health at Newcastle University, UK. “It means that people are going to be more cautious about future studies,” he says.
“On the other hand,” he added, “I think a high degree of caution is justified when we’re dealing with a trait that’s going to be as complex in its genetic underpinnings as longevity.”
Scientist
DIsclosure: Blogger Tinker Ready is a former student and current adjunct instructor at the BU School of Communication.