When Dr. Thomas Perls started his geriatric training more than twenty years ago, he assumed his oldest patients would be the sickest. That they’d have dementia or Alzeimers, and be very frail. But when he was assigned his first nursing home patients over a hundred years old, his main challenge was finding them.
“They were never in their rooms,” he says. “They were always out and about.”
One woman was usually regaling the staff with her piano playing. Another patient had set up shop as a tailor.
“He was mending people’s clothes. He was actually teaching people sewing,” Perls says. “And when he wasn’t doing that, he was robbing the cradle, dating his 85 year old girlfriend. and I was just shocked.”
That was the impetus for the New England Centenarian Study, a project Perls started at Boston University in 1994. It has since collected data on 2300 centenarians. Early on, Perls says he learned that only 20 percent of them are highly functional – but almost 95 percent had been active and independent well into their 90s.
“The price to be paid of living to about 100, was a relatively very short period of disability and dependence upon others,” he says.
The next question was – why? Perls noticed family clusters of centenarians, which could go along with shared environmental factors – like education or nutrition – but also a strong genetic component.
And Perls says it’s not that centenarians don’t have the genes linked to heart disease, cancer or alzheimers. It’s that they may ALSO have a number of protective genes, “each one individually with very modest effects, but as a group, they can have a very strong effect,” he says. “It’s like winning the lottery. If you get one or two numbers, that’s not very rare. Getting seven numbers, that is very rare.”
For example, when it comes to cancer, Perls says centenarians can still get large tumors, “and they don’t spread. They don’t metastisize. Cancers behave differently in centenarians.”
Scientists also link personality traits with longevity. Those who rate low on the ‘neurotic’ scale – and cope well with stress – last longer, Perls says. So do people considered agreeable and extroverted.
“It’s very rare I find a curmudgeon,” he says, “and that goes along with being able to establish friendships, social networks, so as you get older and you need other people to depend upon, those personality traits are conducive to that.”
And there’s a huge gender advantage — 85 to 90 percent of centenarians are women. One theory for that, Perls says, revolves around iron – too much can create a toxic environment for cells, so decades of menstruation slows iron build-up in women.
Scientists also think protective genes occur more often on the X chromosome, and since women have two of those, a gene can pick the healthiest one, “whereas men don’t have that choice,” Perls says. “They just get what the card dealt them on that one X chromosome.’
On top of the factors you can’t control, Perls says healthy living still goes a long way — not smoking, eating well, staying active. It all helps. What doesn’t help, he says, are many products coming out of the anti-aging industry.
“They’ll promote things like growth hormone, and testosterone, maybe a few other concoctions,” he says. “A number of these things I strongly believe are actually really bad for you and will make you age faster. They are especially bad for your wallet.”
Whatever the variables that help an individual live longer, Perls says the overall number of centenarians has doubled in the last twenty years. He credits public health improvements – like clean water, better working conditions, vaccines – that first went into effect …. about a hundred years ago.
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