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On May 19, 1988, the scientific journal Nature published a brief report by two psychologists titled Do right-handers live longer? This article purported to demonstrate a statistically significant difference in longevity between right- and lef- handers, based on data collected about professional baseball players: These same authors published another study (Handedness and Life Span) in the equally prestigious New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), this one compiled by sampling the death records for the year 1990 in two California counties, which they argued demonstrated an even larger difference in lifespan between left and right handers: Critics of these studies have noted that their methodologies were flawed, as they assumed a static proportion of left and right handed people throughout time, despite the fact that many people who were born in early 1900s were likely pressured to become right-handed at an early age and would not identify as left-handed at death. Historical records support this argument, presented in the book Language Lateralization and Psychosis: This meant that using a single cohort of individuals who died in the year 1990 would be biased by the fact that people who identified as left-handers were, statistically speaking, a younger group of people. A good explanation of the result of such a bias was provided in a series of letters to the editor regarding the NEJM study, notably the following from epidemiologist Kenneth Rothman: This same issue of longevity and handedness was pondered using data from the Danish Twin Registry, which looked at 118 opposite-handed twin pairs to see which individual died first: This approach, which was not biased by the same statistical issues as the previous studies, agrees with the general scientific consensus that longevity and handedness are completely unrelated.
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