Ever wondered what it takes to live to 100? It turns out the answer may have to do with your blood. Deeply concerned with what keeps centenarias ticking, researchers have gone to great lengths to study people living past 100 years of age. Let’s take a gander at what scientists have found.
Centenarians are no longer a rare breed; their numbers have about doubled every decade since the 1970s. But what is their secret? In an attempt to unlock this mystery, researchers compared the blood biomarkers between individuals who lived up until 100 and those who did not. And the findings are simply fascinating!
Scientists published a GeroScience study looking at the blood profiles of 44,000 Swedes from age 64 to 99 and had follow up data for as long as 35 years. Of those enrollees, 1,224 lived to age 100; surprisingly, 85% were women. The team looked at the 12 blood based biomarkers that are considered indicators of inflammation, metabolism, liver, kidney function, and possible signs of malnutrition and anemia—measures of cholesterol, glucose, creatinine, uric acid levels, and others.
So what did they find? In general, the people who reached had lower levels of all three—from their sixties on—glucose, creatinine, and uric acid. Hardly any centenarians had a glucose level higher than 6.5 mmol/L earlier in life or a creatinine level higher than 125 µmol/L. This may mean the metabolic basis of exceptional longevity linked with dietary habits.
But it doesn’t literally concern being within the range of ‘normal’. Indeed, both the centenarians and non centenarians very frequently had values outside the so called normal ranges of clinical guidelines, which typically refer to a younger and thus healthier population. Rather, on several of these biomarkers, the centenarians rarely had extremely high or low values.
As for the biomarkers that were associated with the likelihood of living to 100, all but two had a relationship between them and the likelihood of living to 100. Principally, though, subjects who lived to 100 had lower levels of glucose, creatinine, and uric acid. In the case of uric acid, the difference was quite marked. Thus, those in the lowest group of uric acid concentration had only a 4 percent chance of living to 100, as compared with 1.5 percent among the highest.
The deviations that we saw were generally quite small, says Associate Professor Karin Modig at the Karolinska Institutet, one of the authors of this study. “The differences we discovered were overall rather small, they suggest a potential link between metabolic health, nutrition and exceptional longevity.” However, says Modig, no inference can be drawn from the study about what sort of lifestyle factors or genes lie behind the respective biomarker values. One can only assume that things like nutrition and alcohol consumption might be influencing factors, but it is likely not a bad idea to track your kidney and liver values along with glucose and uric acid with age.
Of course, chance likely has a contribution to make as well. Nonetheless, the fact that differences at the biomarker level could already be observed far away from death suggests that the genes and lifestyle may have a big role in attaining such an exceptional age.
It’s not just good genes or luck that enables living to 100; it’s the complex interplay of a variety of factors that researchers only now are beginning to understand. Keeping your metabolic health in check and all aspects of life in balance will most likely increase your chances of joining the ranks of the centenarians. Thus, be sure to keep these biomarkers at bay your future self might thank you for that!
