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.

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

See also

References

External links