Secret to longevity lies in genes: Study

Washington: Want to live to be 100? Pick old grandparents.
It's an old irony, but researchers said on Tuesday they had shown this is remarkably true when it comes to surviving into old age, and they believe a cluster of just a few genes may be responsible.
They have set up a company that studies centenarians to see if the genetic secret to living a long and healthy life may result in drugs that can prevent the diseases of aging, such as Alzheimer's and heart disease.

"It isn't really that obvious," Dr. Thomas Perls, who led the study, said in a telephone interview. "It isn't old age that runs in families. It's exceptional old age that runs in families.

"We think this may be a handful of genes that could be playing really substantial roles in the ability to get to very old age, much of it in good health."

Perl's team at Harvard University and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical School studied 444 families, including more than 2,000 relatives of people who lived to 100.

Demographer John Wilmoth of the University of California Berkeley compared this data to the 1900 census and the Social Security Administration's database.

"Female siblings had death rates at all age at about one-half the national level," they wrote in their report, published in this week's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Male siblings of centenarians were at least 17 times as likely to attain age 100 themselves, while female siblings were at least eight times as likely."

Perls is not interested in extending life at any cost. Bureau Report