Why Are We Seeing More Centenarians?

Centenarian Playbook Issue #3: Centenarians are still unique, but what’s unique about them?

👋 Hello, I’m Kevin Ferguson, author of 🍷 Rain on the Monte Bello Ridge,🍷 my forthcoming memoir about health, aging and winemaking. (Read the book's origin story.) 🍇 The Centenarian Playbook is my newsletter, which features longevity tips and stories from Grandma Kay’s long life. It also includes stories of the Gemello Winery, which her late husband, Mario, ran for nearly half a century. 📖 I’m sure you’ll find my maternal grandparents are quite lovable characters. You can subscribe by clicking on this handy little button.

This newsletter is published twice a month on Mondays. Every third Monday features a story or tips on living a longer, higher-quality of life.

Grandma Kay shows her appreciation for her souvenirs sent to her by the San Francisco Giants, leading up to her 100th birthday in 2021.

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Why Are We Seeing More Centenarians?

Grandma Kay’s 103rd birthday is two months away. Until she hit her nineties, no one expected her to possess longevity genes. Her father died of lung disease at 43. Her mother barely outlived her era's life expectancy, exceeding it just by nine percent. Manda Bess, her mother, passed away at 76 in 1962. 

Great Grandma Bess’ death resulted from something that is routinely screened for today when most people go to the doctor for a physical: high cholesterol and high blood pressure. That turned out to be part of a lethal combination of symptoms, tied to a buildup of plaque in her arteries, known as atherosclerosis.

One night while she slept, a blood clot formed, disrupting blood flow triggering a cardiac arrest. She died suddenly.

In the mid 1960s, the recognition that high blood pressure could be screened for and treated was “a huge reason” for an increase in life expectancy, said Dr. Tom Perls, founder and director of the New England Centenarian Study. Grandma Kay is part of this study. “And by doing so, people had a less chance of [dying from] hypertension, kidney failure and stroke.”

Thirty years ago, centenarians represented one in every 10,000 people in the United States. Today, that ratio has been slashed in half. One in every 5,000.

This is partly due to a more health conscious society: an increase in people focused on managing their stress, improving their diet, exercising and not smoking, said Perls. As a result, more people are able to slow the aging process by avoiding or delaying getting age-related diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, heart disease, stroke, diabetes and cancer.

In last month’s post, Perls discussed how much a person’s longevity is driven by their healthy habits vs. genetics.

Here are three more takeaways from that interview.

1. Centenarians represent about one percent of the U.S. population. They tend to have more “good genes” than the rest of us. What does “good genes” really mean? 

Dr. Perls said centenarians have just as many of the “bad genes,” or genetic variants associated with increased risk for age-related diseases as those who die younger.

“What’s different about centenarians is that they likely have protective genes as well,” Dr. Perls said. “These are genes that protect against those things. Each one has a modest effect in influencing how old we live to be, but when you get the right combination, you have a greater chance to live to 100. And if you get even a rarer combination, you can live to extreme old age, like 105 or 110.”

“What’s different about centenarians is that they likely have protective genes as well,” Dr. Perls said.

2. It’s well known that good genetics tend to run in families. However, research also suggests healthy behaviors also run in families, too. What kind of healthy behaviors are we talking about?

Healthy habits and environments that run in families include diet, whether a person smokes or not, exercise and years of education, Dr. Perls said.

3. It’s also well documented that women outlive men. Is there any research that suggests why?

“It’s mostly theoretical,” Perls said. “But we do know that 85 percent of centenarians are women. The one percentile of the longest living Americans is 102 for women, and 99 for men.”

The New England Centenarian Study, run out of the Boston University Medical Center, has been analyzing why some people make it to 100, while most don’t since 1995. It’s one of the nation’s largest studies of centenarians with more than 3,000 participants.

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