Studies of centenarian pedigrees led to our findings with co-investigator, Ruth Fretts M.D. (Instructor at Harvard Medical School and Obstetrician-Gynecologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center) that middle aged mothers live longer. Essentially, we found that centenarian women were four times more likely to have had children while in their forties compared to women who lived only to their early seventies. A woman's ability to naturally have children (that is, without the help of fertility experts) in her forties probably means her reproductive system is aging slowly and therefore the rest of her is as well. This would be predictive of one's ability to reach extreme old age. This work was reported September 12, 1997 in Nature. See our background section for the full text.

Centenarian Siblings Increase Your Life Expectancy
Boston, MA -- If your brother or sister lived to 100 years you have a 4 or 5-times greater chance of surviving to age 90, than if your sibling died in their seventies, supporting a link between the ability to achieve extreme old age and how prevalent it is in your family,say Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center scientists in the May 23 The Lancet. Female siblings of centenarians survived to a median age of 80 and males to 76, whereas male and female siblings of 73-year-olds only survived to a median age of 74 - the average life expectancy.

The authors showed that having a centenarian sibling increases one's chances of surviving to very old age, indicating a strong familial component to longevity. "If you know you have longevity in your family you can relax a bit" says gerontologist and lead author Thomas Perls. "If there's not longevity in your family it's a wake-up call." It may be more important for people in this category to beware of lifestyle choices that decrease longevity such as smoking, obesity, lack of exercise, and lack of regular checkups with a physician, he says.

Perls, head of the New England Centenarian Study, and his colleagues studied families of ten centenarian men and 92 centenarian women living in the Eastern Massachusetts area. They compared survival of the centenarians' siblings with siblings of 28 men and 49 women who were born in 1896 and died at 73 years of age. Comparing people born in approximately the same year as the centenarians controlled for factors affecting survival such as W.W.I, the 1919 influenza epidemic, and the Great Depression, that may have otherwise confounded the results.

Survival rates for the two sibling groups were the same at younger ages, but after age 70 the centenarians' siblings had an increasing survival advantage. Female siblings of centenarians were 4 times as likely to reach age 90-94, and male siblings were 5 times as likely. The survival advantage appeared to continue increasing beyond age 90-94.

The results further support emerging research suggesting a link between genetics and longevity. By focusing on survival to extreme old age, the authors say their study is most likely to detect a genetic effect if familial factors play a greater role with increasing age, a finding never proven before, until now.

The centenarians in the study also had more siblings than the 73 year olds. The authors speculate that there may be more children in these families because there is an associated ability to have children later in life and therefore to have more of them. This theory is supported by recent research from Perls's group showing that female centenarians were more likely to have had children beyond age 40 compared with women who died at the age of 73 years.

This study was funded by the Alzheimer's Association, the Andrus Foundation, the National Institute on Aging, and the Paul Beeson Physician Faculty Scholars in Aging Research Program.

The implications of the finding that extreme old age does run in families are significant.

A lot of people don't know that the scientific conventional wisdom is that the heritability of longevity is low. The problem is that studies in the past, primarily of twins, have been based upon people only reaching, at the most, their early eighties. Our finding that siblings of centenarians live longer supports the assertion that the ability to achieve extreme old age requires a genetic advantage relative to people who survive only to their mid to late eighties.

These findings help open the door for the search for genes in humans which affect rates of aging and susceptibility to diseases associated with aging.

These findings help people realize that if members of their families generally die at average life expectancy or younger they need to take this as a warning. They really do need to practice good health habits and see their doctor for screening against cancers, high blood pressure and other age-related illnesses.