2023-11-08 17:14:12
Centenarians, once considered a rarity, have become the fastest-growing demographic of the world’s population. Their number has doubled approximately every ten years since the 1970s.
How long human beings can live and what determines a long and healthy life have been topics of interest for as long as we know. Plato and Aristotle debated and wrote about the aging process more than 2,300 years ago.
However, understanding the secrets of exceptional longevity is not easy. It involves unraveling the complex interaction of the genetic predisposition and lifestyle factors and how they interact throughout a person’s life.
Now, our recent study, published in GeroSciencehas revealed some common biomarkers, such as cholesterol and glucose levels, in people living beyond 90 years of age.
Nonagenarians and centenarians have long been of great interest to scientists, as they can help us understand how to live longer and, perhaps, how to age in better health. Until now, studies on centenarians have often been small-scale and focused on a selected group, for example excluding centenarians living in care homes.
Huge data set
Ours is the largest study carried out to date in which biomarker profiles measured throughout life are compared between exceptionally long-lived people and their less long-lived peers.
We compared the biomarker profiles of people who lived to be over 100 years old with those of their shorter-lived counterparts, and investigated the relationship between the profiles and the probability of becoming a centenarian.
Our research included data from 44,000 Swedes who underwent health assessments between the ages of 64 and 99: they were a sample of the so-called Amoris cohort. These participants were then followed through Swedish registry data for 35 years. Of these people, 1,224, that is, 2.7% lived to be 100 years old. The vast majority (85%) of centenarians They were women.
Twelve blood biomarkers related to inflammation, metabolism, liver and kidney function, as well as possible malnutrition and anemia were included. All of them have been associated with aging or mortality in previous studies.
The biomarker related to inflammation was uric acid, a body waste product caused by the digestion of certain foods. Markers related to metabolic status and function, such as total cholesterol and glucose, and others related to liver function, such as alanine aminotransferase (Alat), aspartate aminotransferase (Asat), albumin, gamma- glutamyl transferase (GGT), alkaline phosphatase (Alp) and lactate dehydrogenase (LD).
We also analyzed creatinine, related to kidney function, and iron and total iron binding capacity (TIBC), related to anemia. Finally, we also investigated albumin, a biomarker associated with nutrition.
Conclusions
We found that, in general, those who reached the age of one hundred tended to have lower glucose, creatinine and uric acid levels from the sixties onwards. Although mean values did not differ significantly between centenarians and non-centenarians for most biomarkers, the former rarely showed extremely high or low values.
For example, very few of the centenarians had a glucose level above 6.5 at the beginning of their lives, or a creatinine level above 125.
For many of the biomarkers, both centenarians and non-centenarians had values outside the range considered normal in clinical guidelines. This is probably because these guidelines are established based on a younger, healthier population.
By exploring which biomarkers were linked to the likelihood of reaching age 100, we found that all but two (alat and albumin) showed a connection to that likelihood. And this even after taking into account age, sex and disease burden.
People who were in the lowest group of five for total cholesterol and iron levels were less likely to reach age 100 compared to those with higher levels. Meanwhile, people with higher levels of glucose, creatinine, uric acid and markers of liver function also had a lower chance of becoming centenarians.
In absolute terms, the differences were quite small for some of the biomarkers, while for others the differences were somewhat more substantial.
In the case of uric acid, for example, the absolute difference was 2.5 percentage points. This means that the people in the group with the Lower uric acid levels had a 4% chance of turning 100while in the group with the highest levels only 1.5% reached that age.
Although the differences discovered were overall quite small, they suggest a possible link between metabolic health, nutrition and exceptional longevity.
The study, however, does not allow conclusions to be drawn about which lifestyle factors or genes are responsible for the biomarker values. However, it is reasonable to think that factors such as nutrition and alcohol intake play a role. Keeping track of kidney and liver values, as well as glucose and uric acid as you age, is probably not a bad idea.
That said, it is likely that chance will play a role at some point in reaching an exceptional age. But the fact that differences in biomarkers could be seen long before death suggests that genes and lifestyle may also play a role.
This article was originally published in The Conversation.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Karin Modig
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