Dawning of the Age of… Centenarians
..............................................................................................

Babies born today may be blowing out candles on their 100th birthday.

A new report from “The Lancet” suggests that reaching 100-years-old may become ordinary for babies born after 2000. Their report, Ageing Populations: the Challenge Ahead, states that life expectancy has been increasingly steadily in developed countries such as the United States, France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, Canada and Japan.

If this pace continues, reaching the age of 100 will become ordinary for most people in those countries.

The New England Centenarian Study at Boston University examines living centenarians, their lifestyles and their family history and has come up with some common characteristics of those living to see their 100th birthday:

-- Few centenarians are obese. In the case of men, they are nearly always lean.

-- Substantial smoking history is rare.

-- A preliminary study suggests that centenarians are better able to handle stress than the majority of people.

-- Finding that many centenarians (30%) had no significant changes in their thinking abilities disproved the expectation by many that all centenarians would be demented. Alzheimer’s disease is not inevitable. Some centenarians had very healthy brains.

-- Many centenarian women have a history of bearing children after the age of 35 years and even 40 years. A woman who naturally has a child after the age of 40 has a four times greater chance of living to 100 compared to women who do not.

-- At least 50% of centenarians have first-degree relatives and/or grandparents who also achieve very old age, and many have exceptionally old siblings.

-- Many of the children of centenarians (age range of 65 to 82 years) appear to be following in their parents’ footsteps with marked delays in cardiovascular disease, diabetes and overall mortality.

-- Exceptional longevity runs strongly in families. Brothers and sisters of centenarians maintain half the mortality rate of other people born in the same time period, from age 20 all the way into extreme old age.

Researchers involved in the New England study have developed a web site, “Living to 100 Life Expectancy Calculator,”  to estimate how old you will live to be. This 40 question survey asks questions related to healthy and family history. Check it out at www.livingto100.com