A new study suggests that your genes will determine if you can live up to 100.
Researchers at the Boston University Medical Center found that if a person has a sibling who reached an extremely old age, then he or she is more likely to be the same compared to an average person born around the same time. The chances increase as the longevity increases, showing a direct link between genes and living a long life.
The team involved 1,500 participants for the study and focused on 1,900 sibling relationships. The families have at least one person who reached at least 90 years old.
"These much higher relative chances of survival likely reflect different and more potent genetic contributions to the rarity of survival being studied, and strongly suggest that survival to age 90 and survival to age 105 are dramatically different phenotypes or conditions, with very different underlying genetic influences," the authors wrote in a press release.
The researchers discovered that if one has a sibling who reached his or her 90th birthday, the chance of that person reaching the same extremely old age is almost twice as high as that of the average person. Those with siblings who recently celebrated their 95th birthday, on the other hand, are 3.5 times more likely to do the same. And if you have one who has been around for a century, then your chance of living that long is nine times higher than that of those who don't have such siblings.
It is very rare that a person can stay alive until he or she is 105 years old, but if that person is sharing the genes with a sibling, then that person is 35 times more likely to have that longevity as well.
"Findings from this and other studies of much older (and rarer) individuals show that genetic makeup explains an increasingly greater portion of the variation in how old people live to be, especially for ages rarer than 100 years," Thomas Perls, study co-author and professor of medicine at the BU School of Medicine, said in the press release,
The study was published in the March 26 issue of the Journal of Gerontology: Biological Sciences.
