Families Enriched for Exceptional Longevity also have Increased Health-Span: Findings from the Long Life Family Study

Abstract

Hypothesizing that members of families enriched for longevity delay morbidity compared to population controls and approximate the health-span of centenarians, we compared the health-spans of older generation subjects of the Long Life Family Study (LLFS) to controls without family history of longevity and to centenarians of the New England Centenarian Study (NECS) using Bayesian parametric survival analysis. We estimated hazard ratios, the ages at which specific percentiles of subjects had onsets of diseases, and the gain of years of disease-free survival in the different cohorts compared to referent controls. Compared to controls, LLFS subjects had lower hazards for cancer, cardiovascular disease, severe dementia, diabetes, hypertension, osteoporosis, and stroke. The age at which 20% of the LLFS siblings and probands had one or more age-related diseases was approximately 10 years later than NECS controls. While female NECS controls generally delayed the onset of age-related diseases compared with males controls, these gender differences became much less in the older generation of the LLFS and disappeared amongst the centenarians of the NECS. The analyses demonstrate extended health-span in the older subjects of the LLFS and suggest that this aging cohort provides an important resource to discover genetic and environmental factors that promote prolonged health-span in addition to longer life-span.

Extended maternal age at birth of last child and women’s longevity in the Long Life Family Study

“…Age reporting in the US LLFS sample has been shown to be of high quality [5]. Additional details about the LLFS such as phenotypic measures have been well described [6,7]. …”

Lower circulating insulin-like growth factor-I is associated with better cognition in females with exceptional longevity without compromise to muscle mass and function

“…Although aging is a major risk factor for cognitive impairment, some individuals with exceptional longevity demonstrate delayed onset of dementia by as much as 13 years, with many not manifesting it at all [2, 3]. The fact that individuals with exceptional longevity possess factors that allow them to delay or avoid age related diseases make them a particularly attractive model for the study of healthy aging [4].…”

DNA repair systems

“…proposed that people who live to >107 years of age tend to 'compress' morbidity and disability in the very ends of their lives -that is, they are generally healthy throughout their very long lives and develop serious diseases only at very advanced age [1239,1369]. We already saw, however, that there may be people living to >95 in all morbidity categories, and that being healthy in youth does not guarantee health in middle and advanced age, therefore, there is no way of telling by the morbidity pa ern in young age how the life expectancy is shaping for the par cular person, unless there is serious disease developing at young age (e.g.…”