Aging is often associated with the onset of chronic diseases, including heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer's. Centenarians, however, are somehow able to delay or entirely escape these infirmities. Speaking at the 2002 Friends of the Center for Human Nutrition's spring meeting, aging expert Dr. Thomas Perls, associate professor in medicine and a geriatrician at Boston Medical Center, said there is a key genetic region that plays a critical role in how centenarians age so well and live so long. That's good news for the one in 10,000 Americans who are 100 and above, but what about individuals who lack this favorable set of genes?
A positive attitude, active lifestyle and good nutrition may be key components, Dr. Perls said. "Maybe you don't have quite the optimum set of genes to get you to 100, but you can get there anyway because you've done more than you need to do in terms of living healthy," Dr. Perls said. "There are a number of things that one can do with or without the genes to get to very old age. "In addition to eating the right things and exercising, doing things that are intellectually stimulating your brain are going to add func-tional reserve and adaptive capacity and actually slow down any progres-sion of Alzheimer's disease. By having good health habits, you're not going to add unhealthy years to your life. That doesn't make sense. The only years that you are going to add are healthy years."
Since 1995, Dr. Perls and his research collaborators have accumulated about 100 pedigrees in the world's largest genetic study of centenarians, known as the New England Cente-narian Study. His finding so far are promising not only for centenarians, but for most people. "People often ask if I'm trying to find the fountain of youth," Dr. Perls said, "but actually we're looking for the fountain of aging well. We want to find out what these genes do to help slow down the aging process and help decrease the susceptibility of these diseases and hopefully develop drugs that will mimic what these genes do. If this results in a lot more people being able to get to an older age in good health then that would be fantastic. My goal is to get people to age well." A unique characteristic of cen-tenarians, he said, is their ability to redirect stress. "Most centenarians don't get bent out of shape very much," Dr. Perls said. "They seem to see the optimistic side of things, and they just manage stress very, very well." In his book, Living to 100, Lessons in Maximizing Your Potential At Any Age, Dr. Perls notes that growing older does not necessarily mean growing sicker. The principal reason society is becoming older, he notes, is because it's much healthier. From a genetic standpoint, Dr. Perls said, there are probably a few require-ments to get to a very old age. Lacking the variations of genes that predispose individuals to disease is one factor. "If you're genetically susceptible to developing the metabolic syn-drome, hypertension and you eat the wrong things you're going to be in trouble," said Dr. Perls, adding that most centenarians don't smoke or have a history of obesity. "However, if you've demonstrated that you're not particularly susceptible to the meta-bolic syndrome or to other diseases that would normally befall people of that age, it's almost as if you've expanded your period of time you have to look forward to. "Instead of thinking how to stay young, try thinking about how to age well."
