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Loading...Old and Healthy? Thank Your Genes
At 98, Harold Laufman plays the violin, prepares dinner for relatives and throws a joint birthday party with his 31-year-old neighbor. He is writing a book about life after 95 and calls his girlfriend “feisty.” The retired surgeon says, “I wake up every morning with an agenda for the day.”
According to research published August 3 in the online edition of the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, Laufman probably owes his longevity to the genes he inherited. Dr. Nir Barzilai, Chair of Aging Research and Director of the Institute for Aging Research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University, was lead researcher in a study that looked at over 500 Ashkenazi Jews. All were between ages 95 and 117 and were living independently. Three quarters were women. They were enrolled in the Longevity Genes Project.
The advantage of focusing on the Ashkenazi Jews was their genetic homogeneity. A trained interviewer asked questions about their lifestyles at age 70—drinking and smoking, diet and exercise. The results were compared with responses from 3,164 people surveyed for the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, conducted between 1971 and 1975.
Read more: aging, healthy policy, longevity, old age, public health
Photo from Urbankudos via Flickr Creative Commons
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137 comments
+ add your ownInteresting article - minus video, thank you.
Interesting article - minus video, thank you.
I can't afford to live that long.
lies. everyone knows it is 100% a vegan diet. thats what "they" told me.
Thanks a lot its quite inspiring I feel I may also go on the path lead by them,I hv compleated my53 years and I feel myself as young as 25.I wish all msy live long and healthy.
thanks
I would LOVE to live to 100 or even much longer, but only if in good health.
But even if in perfect healthy I wouldn't want to live for 5,000 Million Billion Trillion Quadrillion years to the googolplex power (which doesn't even begin scratch the surface of eternity), like religious people apparently are imagining when they pine about everlasting life.
No. Not genetics. Cohesive, positive culture.
thanks for sharing.
Synthetic organs if properly designed can not only be mass produced cheaply (no waiting list), but if manufactured correctly can be installed easily (low cost surgeries). Another benefit is that unlike biological transplants that run the risk of infecting you with whatever the donor had (disease or bad DNA) synthetic organs can be controlled for quality.
Synthetic organs would VASTLY reduce the cost of health care for everyone. I look forward to a future where I can pick up a new heart, AND get it installed at Wal-Mart. Maybe it will have a built in MP3 player. =3
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