Sibling centenarians Helen Happy Reichert, 109, with her brother Irving Kahn, 105.
New York centenarians are the starting point for a nationwide effort to figure out the genetic and lifestyle elements contributing to long, healthy lives.
As our colleagues at the WSJs Metropolis blog report, geneticist Nir Barzilai, of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, has spent more than a decade studying the factors that help people maintain a good quality of life even past the 100-year mark. Specifically, hes studied 500 Ashkenazi Jews, because they are relatively genetically homogeneous.
As Metropolis reports:
Barzilai and his team at Einsteins Institute for Aging Researchhave so far discovered three uncommon genotype similarities among the centenarians: one gene that causes HDL, good cholesterol, to be at levels two- to three-fold higher than average; another gene that results in a mildly underactive thyroid, which slows metabolism; and a functional mutation in the human growth hormone axis that may be a safeguard from age-related diseases, like cancer.
Barzilais work is the template for an 18-month national study to sequence the genomes of 100 ethically and geographically diverse centenarians. Read more about it at Metropolis.
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