August 8, 2017
AGING RULES
For a number of years I have been interested in the cohort managed by the Gerontology Research Group at UCLA. I’ve been friends with their leaders and have invited them to present their material here at Stanford.
This group overseas the oldest people in the world, the Super centenarians. My interest therefore was drawn to an article recently published online entitled “what we can learn from super centenarians about our own aging.”
It references a scientific article authored by Stuart Kim and colleagues when Kim was in the department of developmental biology here at Stanford. Their article was entitled ”whole genome sequencing of the world’s oldest people “ and was published a PLOS in 2014. Their experimental cohort was drawn from the super-centenarians on register at UCLA . It selected 17 of them to explore the possible basis that their extreme longevity may have a genetic origin.
I’ve heard it a thousand times.” If you want to live a long time choose old grandparents.” TRUE? Does how long we live depend on our grandparents? Or, if a patient comes to my office and reports that everyone in their family background died on their 50th birthday and the patient is 49 ½ years old I do not at that moment say “good luck”. I try to tease out the reasons that all the ancestors had died and what the patient was doing to avoid the shoals that threaten. It makes sense that one fundamental way to live a long time is not to die. Interestingly, a health inventory of these oldsters elicited fewer illnesses. The supercentenarians were not only old they were healthier too.
Kim and his Stanford colleagues performed an exhaustive detailed survey of the supercentenarian gene profile. They failed to find a significant result to explain this super longevity. Of interest was that some of these very old folks had genetic lesions that were supposed to be fatal , but the old folks were merrily going about their business without a problem.
All of this heroic work only served to confirm what I had held as a truth before that is that the length and quality-of-life depends less on the cards that we have been dealt than how we play the hand.
Dare to be 100.