The longer the life, the stronger the health
Recent studies have shown that human life expectancy can be increased. New data obtained by scientists of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, working under the guidance of Professor Nir Barzilai, indicate that these additional years may well be lived in good health.
The authors of the study assessed the health status of approximately 3,000 people aged about 100 years. To do this, they analyzed data collected during two ongoing clinical trials: the Longevity Genes Project (LGP) and the New England Centenarian Study (NECS). Within the framework of the LGP, Professor Barzilai and colleagues have been examining healthy, independent Ashkenazi Jews aged 95 years and older living in the northeastern United States since 1998. As a comparison group in LGP, a group of Ashkenazis with no family history of longevity is used. NECS was started in 1994 as a study involving centenarians living in 8 cities in the Boston area. Subsequently, it began to include participants from all over North America, as well as England, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. The study uses a group of people aged 58 to 95 years as a comparison group.
As part of the work, the authors compared the health status of 483 centenarians from LGP with the health status of 696 people aged 60-94 from the comparison group, as well as the health status of 1498 centenarians from NECS with 302 participants in the comparison group aged 58-95 from the same study. For both comparison groups, the researchers determined the age at which the participants developed 5 major age-related health problems: cancer, diseases of the cardiovascular system, hypertension, osteoporosis and stroke. The analysis revealed a stable trend of delayed onset of diseases in the groups of centenarians from both studies (LGP and NECS) compared with the corresponding comparison groups.
For example, for NECS centenarians, cancer did not develop in 20% of men before the age of 97, and women before the age of 99. At the same time, 20% of the participants in the comparison group from NECS developed cancer by the age of 67 in men and by the age of 74 in women. Comparable results were obtained for LGP: for long-livers from LGP, the age by which 20% of participants developed cancer was 96 years for both sexes. In the LGP comparison group, cancer affected 20% of men by the age of 78 and women by the age of 74.
Despite genetic, social and cultural differences, long-livers from LGP and NECS showed comparable results for major diseases. Compared with younger participants of the comparison groups, the main age–related diseases developed later - during the last few years of life. These data indicate that the data obtained for one group of centenarians can be distributed to different populations. At the same time, they contradict the notion that the older people get, the more their health deteriorates and the more expensive their medical care costs.
Article by Khadija Ismail et al. Compression of Morbidity Is Observed Across Cohorts with Exceptional Longevity published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.
Evgeniya Ryabtseva
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru
based on the materials of Albert Einstein College of Medicine: Living Longer Associated with Living Healthier, Study of Centenarians Finds.
12.07.2016