New England Centenarian Study
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The New England Centenarian Study is a study of persons aged 100 and over (
centenarian A centenarian is a person who has reached the age of 100 years. Because life expectancies worldwide are below 100 years, the term is invariably associated with longevity. In 2012, the United Nations estimated that there were 316,600 living cente ...
s) in the
Boston Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...
area. The study began in 1994 and was originally focused on research into
Alzheimer's Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disease that usually starts slowly and progressively worsens. It is the cause of 60–70% of cases of dementia. The most common early symptom is difficulty in remembering recent events. As t ...
. However, it soon became apparent that most centenarians did not have Alzheimer's even though other forms of
dementia Dementia is a disorder which manifests as a set of related symptoms, which usually surfaces when the brain is damaged by injury or disease. The symptoms involve progressive impairments in memory, thinking, and behavior, which negatively affe ...
were commo, so it transitioned into finding out why some people can live to 100 and others do not. Some findings included that centenarians had natural advantages, including large
platelet Platelets, also called thrombocytes (from Greek θρόμβος, "clot" and κύτος, "cell"), are a component of blood whose function (along with the coagulation factors) is to react to bleeding from blood vessel injury by clumping, thereby ini ...
size. Studies for genes managed to identify only one major gene associated with longevity. Researchers are now investigating more detailed genetic analysis including
epigenetics In biology, epigenetics is the study of stable phenotypic changes (known as ''marks'') that do not involve alterations in the DNA sequence. The Greek prefix '' epi-'' ( "over, outside of, around") in ''epigenetics'' implies features that are "o ...
. Formerly located at
Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...
, the Study is now located at
Boston University Boston University (BU) is a private research university in Boston, Massachusetts. The university is nonsectarian, but has a historical affiliation with the United Methodist Church. It was founded in 1839 by Methodists with its original campu ...
and led by Dr. Tom Perls. In 2006, an offshoot, the New England Supercentenarian Study, was begun. A study of gene tests of hundreds of centenarians reported in July 2010 that genetics plays an extremely important role in deciding who reaches that age. Centenarians rarely develop diseases of aging, and are more likely to bounce back from diseases. Led by Perls, the study was funded by the
National Institute on Aging The National Institute on Aging (NIA) is a division of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), located in Bethesda, Maryland. The NIA itself is headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland. The NIA leads a broad scientific effort to understand the ...
's Division of Geriatrics and Clinical Gerontology.


See also

*
Ageing Ageing ( BE) or aging ( AE) is the process of becoming older. The term refers mainly to humans, many other animals, and fungi, whereas for example, bacteria, perennial plants and some simple animals are potentially biologically immortal. In ...
*
Gerontology Gerontology ( ) is the study of the social, cultural, psychological, cognitive, and biological aspects of aging. The word was coined by Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov in 1903, from the Greek , ''geron'', "old man" and , ''-logia'', "study of". The fie ...
* Okinawa Centenarian Study *
Research into centenarians A centenarian is a person who has attained the age of 100 years or more. Research on centenarians has become more common with clinical and general population studies now having been conducted in France, Hungary, Japan, Italy, Finland, Denmark, the ...
*
Supercentenarian A supercentenarian (sometimes hyphenated as super-centenarian) is a person who has reached the age of 110 years. This age is achieved by about one in 1,000 centenarians. Supercentenarians typically live a life free of major age-related diseases u ...


References


External links


New England Centenarian Study


* ttp://www.bumc.bu.edu/supercentenarian/ New England Supercentenarian Study {{Longevity, state=collapsed Longevity study projects Health in the United States