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TAG | Key to living 100 years: compress disabilities |
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| by William Atkins | |
| Thursday, 14 February 2008 | |
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Researchers from Boston University Medical Center (Massachusetts) conducted the New England Centenarian Study (NECS). In the abstract of their Archives of Internal Medicine paper, they state: “Although it is commonly held that survival to age 100 years entails markedly delaying or escaping age-related morbidities, nearly one-third of centenarians have age-related morbidities for 15 or more years. Yet, we have previously observed that many centenarians compress disability toward the end of their lives. Therefore, we hypothesize that for some centenarians, compression of disability rather than morbidity is a key feature for survival to old age.” Senior researcher and NECS director Thomas Peris and fellow researchers hypothesized that centenarians (people that live to at least the age of 100 years) have a history of aging relatively slowly when compared to non-centenarians and have either a dramatic delay in getting age-related diseases (such as diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and stroke) or entirely are free of these age-related diseases. The Peris team began studying 739 people (523 women and 216 men) living in eight towns around the Boston area, who had lived to be at least 100 years old (centenarians). Previous research had shown that there is one centenarian for every 10,000 people in the general population in the United States. They found that about one-third of them had age-related diseases for fifteen years or more before their 100th birthday. In addition, they found that 90% of them were functionally independent at the age of 92 years, and 75% were still independent at the age of 95 years. And, specifically, 72% of male centenarians and 34% of female centenarians were still free of age-related diseases at the age of 97 years or older. The researchers found that these people, whom they called the “survivors-of-disease" group, had been able to survive very late in their lengthy lives without contracting such diseases.
The centenarians were also to disprove the general contention that as one grows older, one also gets sicker.
The researchers found that the centenarians were very different with regards to years of education, socioeconomic status (very poor to very rich), religion, ethnicity, and patterns of diet (vegetarians to diets high in saturated fats) |
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