The Older You Get, The Healthier You've Been

Posted October 2, 2007, 4:53 pm
Credit Growing Bolder

Dr. Thomas Perls is head of The New England Centenarian Study (NECS), the largest comprehensive study of centenarians in the world. The NECS believes that centenarians are a select group of people who have either markedly delayed or entirely escaped diseases normally associated with aging such as Alzheimer's disease, cancer, stroke and heart disease. Dr . Perls says Centenarians disprove the perception that "the older you get the sicker you get" and offers these predictors of reaching 100.......

Predictors of Reaching 100
Once it truly became apparent that living to 100 was a terrific advantage, not just in years of survival but importantly in many more years of quality life, we set out to understand what factors the centenarians had in common that might explain such an advantage. Not all centenarians are alike. They vary widely in years of education (no years to post-graduate), socioeconomic status (very poor to very rich), religion, ethnicity and patterns of diet (strictly vegetarian to extremely rich in saturated fats). However, the centenarians we have studied do have a number of characteristics in common:

* Few centenarians are obese. In the case of men, they are nearly always lean.
* Substantial smoking history is rare.
* A preliminary study suggests that centenarians are better able to handle stress than the majority of
people.
* Our finding that many centenarians (30%) had no significant changes in their thinking abilities disproved the expectation by many that all centenarians would be demented (4). We also discovered that Alzheimer's Disease was not inevitable. Some centenarians had very healthy brains.
* Many centenarian women have a history of bearing children after the age of 35 years and even 40 years. From our studies, a woman who naturally has a child after the age of 40 has a 4 times greater chance of living to 100 compared to women who do not (6). It is probably not the act of bearing a child in one's forties that promotes long life, but rather, doing so may be an indicator that the woman's reproductive system is aging slowly and that the rest of her body is as well. Such slow aging and the avoidance or delay of diseases that adversely impact reproduction would bode well for the woman's subsequent ability to achieve very old age.
* At least 50% of centenarians have first-degree relatives and/or grandparents who also achieve very old age, and many have exceptionally old siblings. Male siblings of centenarians have an 11 times greater chance than other men born around the same time of reaching age 97 years and female siblings have an 81⁄2 greater chance than other females also born around the same time of achieving age 100.
* Many of the children of centenarians (age range of 65 to 82 years) appear to be following in their parents' footsteps with marked delays in cardiovascular disease, diabetes and overall mortality.
* Exceptional longevity runs strongly in families. Brothers and sisters of centenarians maintain half the mortality rate of other people born in the same time period, from age 20 all the way into extreme old age. The cumulative effect of this year-to-year survival advantage is that the brothers have a 17 times greater chance of living to 100 and the sisters have an 8 times greater chance.

Want to know more? Click here to listen to Growing Bolder's conversation with Dr. Perls.



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