A colourful character, she enjoyed the limelight, stating "I await death and journalists" ahead of her th birthday. Calment also famously smoked and spoke of her fondness for port and chocolate. She said she met Vincent Van Gogh when he would buy paint from her uncle in Arles in , calling him "ugly as sin" and "an awful character".
US woman, , is now world's oldest. How long could we live? Image source, Getty Images. What did the Russians claim? Russian researchers claimed Calment, seen here on her th birthday, had actually died in the s.
What have the French said? Who was Jeanne Calment? Indeed, we did not learn about this move during our interviews with JC, but we have since determined that the move was only m away in the same neighborhood in or when JC was 9 or 10 not 13 years old see SOM B.
We do not feel it is remarkable that a minor move such as this at the age of ten would not be mentioned. According to a published interview, Novoselov asserted that JC did not look frail enough to be a supercentenarian He referred to the surprise of the Mayor, who made it a habit to visit centenarians on their birthdays, that at age years, JC appeared so spry.
Actually, such spryness is exactly what one would expect from a year-old destined to live another 22 years, to the age of years. In their study of people living to supercentenarians, New England Centenarian Study NECS investigators noted that the morbidity and disability profiles of these individuals support James Fries compression of morbidity hypothesis 17 , That is at the limit of human life span, aging-related diseases and syndromes that increase mortality risk must be delayed towards the time of death.
The NECS found that supercentenarians generally require minimal or no assistance with their activities of daily living or clinically manifest any of the major aging-related diseases heart disease, stroke, diabetes, hypertension, cancer, or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease at the mean age of years Photos of both JC and Sarah Knauss, who died at the age of years in , are examples of how supercentenarians have a history of aging so remarkably slowly.
Supercentenarians are typically characterized as having delayed or escaped major diseases and compressed the time they experience severe decline towards the end of their extremely long lives, and it is not until the relatively short time at the end of their lives that they demonstrate frailty Figure 1.
Photos of Sarah Knaus, ages 99 years and years the latter by Theo Westenberger and Jeanne Calment at years and years. Nonetheless, Novoselov approached Zak to analyze available mortality data to determine whether mathematically, JC was an impossible outlier From his preprint uploaded on Researchgate. He then researched what had been written about JC and subsequently constructed a story that he believes supports a case of fraud 11 , Initial studies argued for an exponential increase in the mortality rate at older age but then a deceleration at extreme ages.
In fact, it is difficult to assess if mortality rates keep increasing with age or tend towards some mortality plateau. Data quality issues combine with small numbers to render these issues to be quite complex and thus approaching the problem with one possible model is incorrect.
Zak declined to investigate multiple possible models of mortality. We formally address the statistical plausibility of a person living to age years later in this paper. To support the hypothesis of an identity switch one must have a motive justifying such a fraud, and then show that such a substitution was practically possible.
As for a motive for why the Calment and Billot families would conspire to commit fraud, Zak wrote,. The inheritance tax for the farm in Saint Martin de Crau could amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars in modern money. It is not hard to imagine that the family had neither desire nor ability to pay the tax, especially twice in a row here, one should recall that Jeanne hated socialists.
This motive is not only speculation, it has no basis. In actuality, French real estate transactions have resulted in notarial deeds for centuries. These documents are publicly available after 70 years and in the case of JC a dozen transactions established before are available see SOM B. Zak is negligent in not noting that Nicolas Calment NC had given all his property to his children on March 15, in exchange for an annual life annuity of 5, francs that his children had to pay him until his death.
The only financial consequence upon the death of NC in is the extinction of the life annuity. According to Zak, another motive could be an annuity contract presumably signed before and still in operation at the time of her death in This second motive seems also to have no basis as it is not reported in the declaration of assets that JC made in on the occasion of the national solidarity tax in application of the Ordinance of August 15, see SOM B.
Her father-in-law had established the local and prominent department store, Grand Magasin Calment, and her father was a city councilman. Novoselov, in his interview 10 stated that the community would not have noticed a switch because Arles is actually based in a large county and that JC and her daughter spent some of their time in a homestead 16 km away from Arles.
Of course, this social circle of friends would have been deceived into believing that it was JC who lived beyond , rather than her daughter, YB. Billot Calment died at the age of 36 years. The death notice of YB has been sent on behalf of 34 people and their children, the staff of the House Calment and 13 different families see SOM C for the notice.
People were invited to gather at the family house and we can guess that many of them attended the funeral wake. In these circumstances, unless we accept the idea of the complicity of dozens of people, a substitution between the bodies of JC and YB was virtually impossible.
Also, such a substitution would have led to an incestuous family configuration. Therefore, according to Zak, YB took the place of her mother and therefore Fernand and Yvonne would have had to act as if they were married.
His own father, Captain Joseph Billot, the husband of Yvonne, would have had to be complicit with the ruse. A conspiracy to commit identity fraud would have required the participation of many people. In fact, the reason she is not listed is because at the time, she was staying in Leysin, Switzerland, being possibly treated for tuberculosis Figure 2. Leysin was home to a number of sanatoriums for the treatment of tuberculosis, and a famous one in particular, the Sanatorium Universitaire Photo of Yvonne in , staying in Leysin, likely at one of its numerous sanatoriums for treatment of tuberculosis.
Oh, that will only be an imaginary burial, they are both in the ground already, but that way, they will be beside me. It is with regret that he leaves the army, but his interests and the health of his wife oblige him to go to live in the South, near Arles. A similar fibroma can be seen in one of the photos of the old Calment. Interestingly, it is absent from later photos, indicating that it was removed. If Yvonne removed it more than once, that could explain its slightly different locations in Figure 3A and B and also the fact that the fibroma appears smaller in the older woman, even though fibromas grow over time.
Zak suggests that the fibroma has been removed when JC was a resident of the nursing home Maison du Lac. Of course, there is no mention of such intervention in the dissertation of Catherine Levraud 21 where she summarizes, with great detail, the medical history of JC after her arrival in the nursing home, between the ages of and Number of deaths at aged years and older, France —, according to the Human Mortality Database.
Thus, here we also refute his mathematical argument. In the broadest sense, the statistical universe of JC is composed of all the lifetimes of human beings throughout the world. Of course, the ages of survival for the vast majority of these lives are unknown. Therefore, we consider a subset within a defined period of time where we have some degree of confidence in its completeness and a substantial similarity in terms of sociodemographic and culture to JC. Thus, we chose France where JC was born and where she lived, and for which we have continuous information on the ages at death since Figure 3 displays the changes over time in the number of deaths recorded at aged years and older for both males and females.
Overall, the number of deaths of centenarians did not increase in France until the post WW II period for women and the s for men. The zoomed in view on the right panel shows that the number of centenarians decreased during the initial period, from to , probably due to the improvement in the quality of the statistics and then remains stable during a second period, from to the end of the WWII.
In , when JC turned years old, deaths of centenarian women were registered, and in , the year of her death, there were 2, deaths recorded. These data relate to 9, individual records of people who died between and in France.
Although virtually no one died at age or older in the s, there are several deaths recorded above this age in the most recent years. They are mostly women. Figure 4 depicts the age at death of JC , age years in the context of the above described data. Obviously, years appears as an outlier, even among the extreme values measured by the MRAD. Modeling of the mortality risk of the and birth cohorts using exponential short dash line , Gompertz plain line , and logistic long dash line functions are shown in Figure 5.
The open dots correspond to the one used to compute the models. The exponential function diverging too quickly was not used here. Simulations set 1: starting with a sample of 10 centenarians, we applied at each age the mortality risk of the logistic and Gompertz functions with a pseudo-random number generator determining the death or living status of each virtual centenarian until the extinction of the whole sample.
Simulations set 2: same as above but starting with centenarians and , runs. Simulations set 3: same as above but starting with , centenarians and runs.
All computations were performed with the Stata software release With samples of and , centenarians, the maximum age ranged from to The Logistic and Gompertz models yield similar results, with the Logistic outperforming the others by a small margin. It must be underlined that these maximum ages were observed even when extrapolation of the functions leads to q x exceeding 0.
In the best simulation set set 3 and Logistic , this event occurs on average once every 10 million centenarians. Based on these data, the survival of JC to years is possible. Considering that the world has experienced somewhere between 8 and 10 million centenarians since at least the s, then a person age years by around the late s is reasonable. According to the Population Division of the United Nations, by , the global number of centenarians within a single year could be as high as 25 millions 25 and so the observance of yet another person age or perhaps even a little older is also reasonable.
Jeanne Calment claim as the record-holder for longevity for the human species, at the years and days, remains valid. Empirically though, the only way to assess that it is an accurate observation is to examine the evidence supporting and challenging the age claim.
Zak never mentioned the existence of well-validated extreme cases of longevity. Sarah Knauss, who passed away at age in , and Marie-Louise Meilleur, who died at age years in , make JC appears less exceptional than if, for example, the next oldest person was years old. Since , five other women have reached the age of years: three of them in the Japanese woman Misao Okawa 26 , the Italian woman Emma Morano 27 and Violet Brown from Jamaica and two of them in the Japanese women Nabi Tajima and Chiyo Miyako The cases of Violet Brown and Nabi Tajima have not yet been thoroughly validated.
We have identified three main limitations of this study. First, time and space limitations to answer in this journal to the dozens of arguments challenging the reported age of JC gathered by Zak and Novoselov. Therefore, we only focused on the main arguments concerning the motive and the practicability of the identity fraud.
When the paper went viral, the French press exploded. And who was this upstart Russian anyway? Zak doubled down in response. As Zak admitted, there was no smoking gun; but together these pieces of circumstantial evidence did emit a fair amount of smoke. The debate spread through the French press and international gerontological circles, becoming increasingly heated. Certainly, it seemed to be an attack on western science.
As well as Calment, Zak expressed doubts about the validation of Sarah Knauss , a Pennsylvanian insurance office manager who had died in , aged , putting her in the silver-medal position behind Calment.
Was the Russian trying to sow doubt, so that his countrymen could take the lead in the gerontology field?
For the people of Arles, it was a matter of local pride. Both camps were equally adamant. One, that the woman who died in the Maison du Lac was the longest-lived human being. The other, that she was a gifted and almost inconceivably determined con artist.
Which was the real Madame Calment? A n age of seems to defy the limits of the possible. Even two decades later, with average lifespans still rising, no one has come within touching distance of Jeanne Calment.
In the supercentenarian league — and above — the three-year gap between her and Knauss might as well be an aeon. In , the British actuary Benjamin Gompertz came up with a prediction model for human mortality, one which estimated that the risk of death increased exponentially with age, doubling every eight years.
When I visit in the last days of August, summer has checked out early; the sky is overcast, the first autumn leaves are on the ground. Yet the cemetery guardian, in a hut a few metres away, assures me that Yvonne is buried with her mother. The counter-investigation has 1, members, drawn from all over the globe, although the core group is made up of proud locals. Distant members of the Calment and Billot families opened up their photo albums and personal papers.
In the spirit of open debate, Zak was also accepted on to the forum, where he kept up a running commentary on the new findings. He was collegiate on the surface, acknowledging that he and the counter-investigation had a shared goal: the truth. But over time they felt his attitude — demanding people chase after evidence on his behalf, unfailingly using it to back up his own theory — begin to rankle.
But digging into the past began to pay dividends. One new photograph donated by a family member showed Yvonne posing on a balcony with a parasol against a mountain backdrop. Another document seemed to confirm the gravity of her condition: her husband, Joseph, an army colonel, was granted five years of compassionate leave in June to look after her. If the switch did take place, maintaining this fiction in plain sight would have required an extraordinary and queasy level of deception.
Many others would need to have been complicit. If Zak knew either the people of Arles or Jeanne Calment, the group argued, he would realise how improbable this was.
But Zak refused to budge. But the women from the counter-investigation group believe he has gone too far down the rabbit hole to consider any theory but his own.
T here is some debate about what happens to rates of mortality in extreme old age. Some researchers believe they continue to rise with the Gompertz curve, until the risk of death in a given year is absolute — with an effective ceiling to human life somewhere between and
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