Do Oscar Winners Live Longer?
Twitchell
You know how if you are a lady, an Oscar is a curse that means your husband will
cheat on you with a tattoo model? Well, there's an upside (aside from, like, the
fact that you won an Oscar): some scientists think Oscar winners live longer.
However, not everybody agrees.
Matthew Herper of the Forbes Medicine Show blog writes that the theory
originated in a 2001 paper by University of Toronto researcher Donald
Redelmeier, whose analysis showed that Oscar-winning actors lived, on average,
four years longer than nominees. This Oscar longevity bump has gained credence
over the years — it's even been mentioned during the show's telecast. But some
other scientists think it may be overblown.
Epidemiologist James Hadley thinks Redelmeier's analysis is tainted by something
called the immortal time bias. This sounds like it comes from Doctor Who, but in
fact "immortal time" is the period during which, because of the way a study's
constructed, a certain event can't happen. So if you're looking at the effect of
winning an Oscar on when somebody dies, that person's whole life before the
Oscar is immortal time. Since people win Oscars at all different ages, not
accounting for this time period messes up the analysis (if any statisticians or
epidemiologists want to explain this better than I just did, more power to you)
— and if you do account for immortal time, the Oscar longevity bump becomes
statistically insignificant.
Redelmeier acknowledges that for real scientific reliability, we'd need to do a
randomized controlled trial wherein we randomly assigned Oscars to various
people and measured how long they lived. I think this is a great idea, because
then we could also definitively determine whether it is an Oscar that makes you
an unlovable bitch whose husband leaves you, or whether that happened because
you made too much money.