Kind of obvious but can it be simply a selection bias? The weakest died in the camps, the survivors would be the healthier, stronger, and therefore have a longer life expectancy than average.
We know that cellular stress response and stress proteins have a positive effect on some functions that could induce longer life span, these tend to be most often related to heat and cold shock which is likely one of the key reasons behind why many cultures developed customs that induce heat or cold shock such as sauna and ice dipping.
So my personal bet is that this goes way beyond simple selection bias that pre-selected the fittest and has likely involved biological changes that were favorable for longevity.
The question now is how to identify these changes and mechanisms and replicate them without having to force someone to live through literal hell.
The survivor bias makes sense, those that would have died at 65-75 years maybe died then when tested by the hardships.
Yes, which is why anorexia is so harmful, and why early intervention for anorexia is so important.
Wouldn't that limit the longevity benefits?
Famines in the modern world are rare, they still exists in some places but those places aren’t exactly stable and have high life expectancy to begin with.
Famines in historic times were both not rare, periodic, and there isn’t nearly enough data to show if there was any benefit to the survivors other than less competition for resources after the famine has subsided.
I’m not sure there has been an event like the holocaust where so many people went on to live what essentially became modern western life with all the advantages it provides as far as life expectancy goes.
To be clear, mine is the null hypothesis. I suggest that no extraordinary or new information can be gleaned from the life expectancy of Holocaust survivors at present. This constrasts with any claim that this information provides a possible bit of support for the notion that starvation can lead to extended life expectancy.
Famines in historic times were both not rare, periodic, and there isn’t nearly enough data to show if there was any benefit to the survivors other than less competition for resources after the famine has subsided.
Lenin’s USSR between ‘21-‘22 (9 million dead), China in ‘27 (About 3 million dead), Stalin’s Holodomor of Ukraine ‘32-‘34 (8 million dead), Henan, China in ‘43 (5 million dead), Bengal ‘43 (2-3 million dead), Mao’s China ‘58-‘62 (10-30 million dead), The DPRK ‘95-‘99 (about 3 million dead and the lasting negative impact is well studied), and many more from Biafra to Dust Bowl era Oklahoma.
I’m not sure there has been an event like the holocaust where so many people went on to live what essentially became modern western life with all the advantages it provides as far as life expectancy goes.
I agree that it’s hard to find a comparison of people leading a “modern Western life,” but plenty of Holocaust survivors didn’t either. Moreover the negative impacts of starvation are well documented, and “longer life expectancy” isn’t in it. Arrayed against that we have a handful of mouse studies, those very creatures we can cure of cancer... for all that doesn’t apply to us.
Though could be both antifragility and selection bias at play.
> What’s the conclusion, beyond answering a question that has stuck with me for four decades? First and most importantly, it’s not that a traumatic time is anything but hideous. It’s instead that those surviving such an event may be sturdier than others, and by so much that it more than offsets the additional ailments they wind up with. In other words, survivors can wind up living longer than average, but they would presumably have lived even longer in the absence of their gruesome experiences. ...
you didn't read the article. the paradoxical observation is that they live longer despite being particularly not healthy.
Whereas selection bias is when some external factor causes analysis to be focused on a specific subset of the broader population. For instance, survey responses reflect the selection bias of people who were willing to take that survey. Reviews on user-generated review sites are biased towards the people that felt strongly enough to leave a review. The example in this post is selection bias. This is not the opinions of views of individual survivors as in survivorship bias. Rather the study is inherently limited to selecting those that were healthy and fit enough to survive the Holocaust.
>Survivorship bias or survival bias is the logical error of concentrating on the people or things that made it past some selection process and overlooking those that did not, typically because of their lack of visibility. This can lead to false conclusions in several different ways. It is a form of selection bias.