June 11, 2002 WASHINGTON (AP) -- Want to live to be 100? Your best chance is to have a brother or sister who also lives to be that old, according to a study.
Researchers analyzed the family health histories of 444 centenarians - people who live to be 100 or more - and found their 2,092 siblings had a high likelihood also of living to be very, very old.
"The quite striking finding was that from age 20 on, it appears that the brothers and sisters of centenarians had half of the mortality risk at any given age compared to the general population," said Dr. Thomas T. Perls, a specialist on aging at the Boston Medical Center and the Boston University Medical School.
By the time they get to very old age, Perls said, brothers have a 17 times greater chance and sisters an 8 1/2 times greater chance of getting to 100.
Perls is first author of a study appearing Tuesday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
He and his co-authors compared the family health histories of the centenarians with survival data from the Social Security Administration for people born in 1900.
They found that the sisters of centenarians had a death rate about half that of the average, while the advantage for brothers was somewhat closer to average in adolescence and young adulthood, but the survival advantage became far above average in later years.
Perls said that about 85 percent of centenarians are women, but the 15 percent of the 100-year-olds who were men tended to be more vigorous.
"The men tend to be in terrific shape, compared to the women," said Perls. "They tend to be functionally independent and to have fewer diseases. There may be fewer of them, but they are in better shape."
The study supports previous work that suggested a genetic complex among centenarians favors avoiding the diseases of aging, such as stroke, heart disease and cancer, disorders that commonly kill people before they reach 100.
Perls said research, involving groups whose religion forbids smoking, drinking or overeating, suggests that nearly everyone has the genetic structure to live to about age 85. After that, he said, there appears to be a particular gene arrangement that permits people to live for 10 decades or more.
To live to 100, he said, people have to spend most of their lives in good health.
Dr. Evan Hadley of the National Institute of Aging, said that studying the very old "could help us understand the factors that contribute to long, healthy lives."
In a statement, Hadley said that "striking finding" by Perl and his co-authors "provides further evidence that centenarians and their relatives are a special group in that they appear to be more resistant to disease or they survive disease better throughout the life span."
Perls said researchers have concluded that genes on Chromosome 4 help people live to be 100, but the specific genes and their actions have yet to be found.
Some studies already have shown the children of centenarians tend, in their 60s and 70s, to have high levels of "good" cholesterol and low levels of "bad" cholesterol. High levels of "good" cholesterol have been linked to protection from heart disease.
Copyright 2002 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
