X-Message-Number: 18229
From: 
Date: Tue, 25 Dec 2001 19:59:18 EST
Subject: What it takes to Live to 100

Usually articles on why people live to be 100 are vapid and useless. However, 
today's New York Times (25 December) has a very interesting article about the 
work of Dr.  Thomas T. Perls. The article is accessible via the following 
link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/25/health/aging/25CENT.html

I've include some interesting quotes below:
                   
"In nine years, Dr. Perls and his research staff have collected health data 
on 1,500 centenarians. And the work has led him to a series of discoveries 
about the very old. They are healthier than anyone ever thought they were, 
first of all. They avoid the most devastating diseases of old age until the 
last few years of their lives. And almost all of them seem to be 
exceptionally good at managing stress and getting along with people.

Even those unmarried women are never alone. "They're full of good humor and 
gregarious," Dr. Perls said. "They're basically very happy, optimistic 
people. You look at a person like Mary Lavigne and you see she has people 
taking her to lunch, people looking after her, because she's so nice." 

Most notably, Dr. Perls and his colleagues have recently found, centenarians 
seem to carry a small handful of genes that enable them to live to 100 or 
better.


In August, Dr. Perls and his colleagues     including two molecular 
geneticists, Dr. Louis M. Kunkel and Dr. Annibale A. Puca of Children's 
Hospital in Boston     announced the results of a study of centenarians with 
very old siblings. After examining their DNA, the researchers determined that 
a longevity-enabling gene might exist in a certain small stretch of 
chromosome No. 4, one of the 23 pairs of human chromosomes.

The researchers hope that Centagenetix, the Boston-based company they 
founded, will home in on that gene before next summer. Ultimately, the 
company hopes to identify a number of longevity genes, figure out how they 
work and create drugs that mimic their actions.

The health histories of Dr. Perls's centenarians suggest that there are three 
kinds of people who achieve extreme old age. Forty percent are "survivors," 
those who live with chronic diseases for decades, beginning in their 60's and 
70's. Another 40 percent are "delayers," who put off illness until their 
mid-80's. And the last 20 percent are "escapers"     people who avoid all 
age-related diseases until they are over 100.

...late motherhood is a marker." It shows that the entire body is aging 
slowly, he said.

The more centenarians Dr. Perls met over the years, the more obvious it 
seemed that longevity could be inherited. He often recalls the day he spotted 
a photograph in The Patriot Ledger in Quincy, Mass., of a man celebrating his 
108th birthday with his 103-year-old sister.

The two of them turned out to have had four siblings who lived past 100, plus 
another sister, still living at 97. Among these siblings' first cousins were 
seven centenarians and 14 others who lived to be at least 90. Two other 
families among his subjects included similarly large collections of extremely 
old people. 

By 1998, Dr. Perls had accumulated enough data to demonstrate that a person 
with a centenarian brother or sister was four and a half times as likely as 
the average person to live to be at least 91. This year, he has refined the 
statistics further: male siblings of centenarians have a chance 17 times as 
great as the average man's of living to 100. And female siblings are eight 
times as likely to reach 100.

Though the gene study has clearly taken center stage, Dr. Perls's work with 
centenarians has raised many other questions that he hopes to investigate. 
For example, he said, he would like to study the theory that it may be 
possible for people to build a "cognitive reserve" that enables them to avoid 
dementia in old age. He described a 103-year-old man who, in psychological 
tests, showed no signs of senility. Yet after the man's death, when his brain 
was examined in autopsy, it was found to be laced with the tangles of dead 
cells that characterize Alzheimer's. Perhaps the man had been able to 

strengthen other parts of his brain     to build a cognitive reserve     to get
around his disease.

Dr. Perls would also like to learn more about the psychology of longevity     
how attributes like spirituality, optimism, humor, financial security, stress 
management and friendships help people live to be 100. "It would be very 
interesting to find out, no matter how good your genes are, what 
environmental things are a must," he said."

One absolute contraindication to living to be 100 that Dr. Perls and his 
colleagues have noted is obesity. No one in their study was obese and most 
maintained life time weights close to the norm for their build.

Mike Darwin

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