Super long - livers

earth-chronicles based on BBC materialsThere are a couple of people on our planet who have managed to live in three different centuries.

What can their experience teach us? – asks the BBC Future correspondent.

The achievement of the centenary is a good reason for celebration, but there are so many centenarians these days that scientists are no longer trying to follow the life of each of them. According to the UN, in 2012, approximately 316 thousand people over 100 years old lived in the world. This number is expected to grow to an impressive three million by 2050.

But there is also a more limited circle of super–long-livers - those who managed to cross the threshold of 110 years. The Los Angeles-based International Gerontological Research Group (GGI) maintains a database of the oldest representatives of humanity. This spring there were 53 of them. But on April 1, the death of the oldest of them, Japanese Misao Okawa, was announced – she was 117 years old. After her, several more centenarians died, and at the time of publication of this article, there were 45 of them in the list of GGI. The compilers of the list themselves, however, believe that it is far from complete.

Okawa was born in 1898. Now there are only two registered centenarians who were born in the XIX century – an American and an Italian. They managed to see three different centuries – perhaps they can be called "three-century centenarians" (although philologists may be able to come up with a better name). More such people will not appear in the world until 2100, And most likely we will lose the remaining two quite quickly – unfortunately, super-long-livers usually do not manage to wear their proud title for a long time.

Time is inexorably taking away the oldest inhabitants of the Earth, and experts from various fields of science – biologists, historians, cultural anthropologists – are frantically rushing to learn as much as possible from these amazing people while they are still with us. And they can tell not only about the secrets of their longevity.

Of course, the most obvious reason to study the oldest people on the planet is the desire to learn how to maintain health until old age. According to Stuart Kim, a developmental biology specialist at Stanford University in the USA, super-long-livers "have an internal clock that seems to lag behind from birth." When they are 60, it seems that they are 40; and when they are 90, that they are 70. "When you meet them in person," Kim says, "you notice that they look and behave as if they are 20 years younger than they really are."

Take, for example, Bessie Brown Cooper, who was born in 1896 in the U.S. state of Tennessee and died at the age of 116 years and 100 days, taking 10th place in history in documented life expectancy. "Many of those with whom I talk exclaim in horror: "God! I wouldn't want to live that long!" says Bessie's grandson, Paul Cooper, who heads a charity dedicated to her grandmother's memory that helps super–long-livers.

But despite the fact that mentioning Bessie's age often causes an awkward reaction, Cooper says that she never seemed old to him. She had no reason to go to a gerontologist, she lived at home and worked in the garden until she was 105, and read a lot until she was 113. "My grandma showed me that healthy aging is wonderful. There's nothing to be afraid of," Cooper notes.

Experts are trying to find genetic and external causes that contribute to long years and maintain health in the declining years. It is already known that one of the main factors is heredity – those who have long-lived ancestors have more chances to live for a long time.

"You can't live to 110 without winning the genetic lottery at birth," says Jay Olshansky, a professor of public health at the University of Illinois in the USA. But neither he nor his colleagues have yet been able to identify specific genes responsible for longevity – largely because it is difficult to collect the necessary number of samples when studying super-long-livers. However, as more and more people approach the distant limits of life expectancy, it will become easier to conduct research.

According to Thomas Perls, professor of medicine and geriatrics at Boston University (USA) and director of the program for the study of centenarians at Boston Medical Center, these studies "will help us not to ensure that as many people as possible live to a ripe old age, but to help us avoid diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, strokes, heart disease and cancer, or delay their onset."

In other words, we are unlikely to be able to ensure that most people live up to 110 years, but the information collected during the study of centenarians may contribute to our living a full life up to 85-90 years.

The value of super-long-livers and centenarians for society, however, is not limited to this rather selfish desire of mankind to find the keys to a healthy old age. Every centenarian has a lot of unique knowledge, some experts consider them living historical encyclopedias. It is especially important here that their memories include not only what a historian, documentarian or journalist would consider worthy of recording. Unedited first-person narratives were largely absent from official historiography until relatively recently, says Doug Boyd, director of the Louis Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky Library in the United States.

"In this way we come to a deeper knowledge and understanding," continues Boyd. As decades pass, people separate their memories from the daily hustle and bustle, put their thoughts in order, learn lessons and experience from the vicissitudes of life. Often their stories are very emotionally rich, which second- and third-hand retellings cannot boast of.

"We can be impressed by a historical movie, but not to the same extent as a real person's story," Cooper notes. "The depth of emotions that is conveyed during a personal conversation cannot be compared with anything."

Therefore, Boyd is currently busy translating his entire collection of oral histories – and he has more than 9400 recordings – into digital format in order to organize them into a free audio and video library with the ability to search. Now, instead of 500 people a year, it is used by more than 8000 visitors a month. These stories, reaching university audiences, podcasts and social networks, are able to change our traditional perception of history, and at the same time clearly demonstrate how rich knowledge and experience older people have.

"I believe that after the barriers separating oral history collections from the general public begin to collapse, the public consciousness will become more informed and dynamic," Boyd hopes. "The recorded voices of people telling their stories and answering questions about life will have an increasingly important cultural significance."

Many years of experience sometimes allows older people to look at modern events from an unexpected side. "They really have a very curious point of view," Perls says, recalling his dialogue with Montana native Walter Breuning, who lived to be 114 years old.

It was in 2008, at the height of the global financial crisis. "He told me: "Here you would try to eat grass every day for a year, as we had in Great Falls during the Great Depression. And then we would talk about how bad things are now." You can't say it better.

Of course, outside of Western civilization, the price of the wisdom of the elders has been known for a long time. In Japan, 43% of old people live with their children – this figure has dropped significantly over the past few decades, but is still significantly higher than in Western countries.

Mayumi Hayashi, a researcher at King's College in London, grew up in a house where three generations lived. Her grandparents, with their love of harmony, hierarchy and the emperor, with their rejection of harsh opinions and individualism, opened a window to Japan's past for her. Their generation represented the last fragments of traditional Japanese society, radically changed after the Second World War.

"Their culture and their values were completely different, and they seemed very old–fashioned to me," says Hayasi. "But the fact that my grandparents lived with me when I was growing up made me pay more attention to the elderly and showed how quickly Japan adopted American ideals."

Or, as Olshansky puts the question: "Is there any benefit from being around smart, wise, elderly people? Yes, undoubtedly."

One of the misconceptions about old age is that aging supposedly inevitably worsens physical and mental health. Super-long-livers refute this thesis. Olshansky and his colleagues found out that the relationship between age and deterioration of health is not confirmed by real statistical data.

"Most of the problems that we consider age–related, in fact, are not related to age as such, but to our own influence on the body - smoking, alcoholism, obesity. This all leads to problems that are then observed in old age," Perls believes. In fact, many people 85 years and older are in about the same physical shape as those 20-30 years younger. More and more experts say that calendar age cannot serve as a reliable indicator of health status.

"I think most people would rather have a healthy 70-year–old man with 30 years of experience at the helm of their passenger plane than a young and early pilot," Perls notes.

But continuing to work at 70 or 80 is not the same as continuing to work at 100. Nevertheless, there are amazing examples of how people successfully continued to engage in professional activities, having crossed the age-old milestone.

103-year-old rheumatologist Efraim Engelman still sees patients in his office at the University of California, San Francisco, where he also heads the Rosalind Russell Medical Research Center for Arthritis. He declares that he has no plans to retire yet. And he is not the first doctor to demonstrate such commitment to his craft. Double-Jay Watson, a medic from Augusta, Georgia, continued to practice until his death at 102, having taken about 15 thousand births during his half-century career. Laila Denmark, who was the only woman in her medical school graduation in 1928, worked as a doctor until the age of 103, and then lived in retirement for another decade until she died at the age of 113.

The biased attitude towards the elderly, perhaps, will never be completely overcome, but the age at which discrimination begins may soon move away: you can already hear expressions like "our 70s are like 50 before."

Perls believes that as more and more people who have changed their ninth and tenth decades will live a full and fulfilling life, this phrase will be adjusted in accordance with the spirit of the times.

This is already happening in Japan. "90 years by Japanese standards is not old age,– says Hayashi. – More than 100 is another matter, there is something to celebrate." Perhaps this is the case because in Japan, old people are everywhere: a quarter of the country's population is over 65 years old, and about 55 thousand have already crossed the century-old milestone. In addition, this is a very active group of the population.

When Hayashi gets up at dawn during her trips to Japan, she notices that the streets are full of elderly people and couples out for morning exercise. After the walk, many Japanese pensioners work as volunteers, closely communicating with younger generations. And in general, Japan is the only country in the world that has an official holiday and a day off in honor of the elderly.

This country can serve as a positive example to other States where the population is also gradually getting older. Of course, the number of people forced to move to nursing homes will inevitably increase, but the number of active elderly people living in their own homes and working or engaged in volunteer activities at the age of 80, 90 or even 100 will also increase. This will be especially noticeable when the retirement age comes for a large post-war generation.

"We, the children of the 1970s, consider ourselves rebels. I can assure you: we will come out to protest against age discrimination," says Olshansky. "We will change the situation, and you, the young ones, will benefit from these changes."

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24.06.2015