Throughout history, creative minds have attempted to discover the key to longevity. Although nutrition and exercise have been credited in much of the study, a group of experts expanded on earlier findings to propose another possibility.
According to a study published Friday in the peer-reviewed journal Lancet eBiomedicine, researchers from Boston University and Tufts Medical Center discovered that people who live to be 100 years old or older, known as centenarians, may have a unique composition of immune cells that is highly protective against illnesses.
“Our data support the hypothesis that centenarians have protective factors that enable (them) to recover from disease and reach extreme old ages,” said Tanya Karagiannis, a senior bioinformatician at Tufts Medical Center’s Center for Quantitative Techniques and Data Science and Institute for Clinical Research and Health Policy Studies.
Centenarians’ Immune systems may have protective factors against illnesses
Individuals with normal immune systems become infected, recover, and learn to adapt to subsequent diseases. While the immune system’s ability to respond to illnesses weakens with age, experts believed that centenarians would be different.
Researchers examined immune cells in the blood of seven centenarians in North America and discovered immune-specific patterns of aging and exceptional human lifespan.
They compared this information to other publicly accessible data that looked at immune cells from people spanning the human lifespan and discovered that centenarians’ immune profiles did not follow typical aging trends.
According to senior author Paola Sebastiani, director of Tufts Medical Center’s Center for Quantitative Methods and Data Science and Institute for Clinical Research and Health Policy Studies, the findings “provide support to the hypothesis that centenarians are enriched with protective factors that increase their ability to recover from infections.”
What makes centenarians live longer? Genetics, lifestyle, or luck?
According to senior author Stefano Monti, associate professor of medicine, biostatistics, and bioinformatics at Boston University’s school of medicine, it’s unknown if this special immune skill is genetic, naturally occurring, or the result of a combination of outside variables.
“The answer to what makes you live longer is a very complex one,” he said. “There are multiple factors, there’s the genetics – what you inherit from a parent, there’s a lifestyle, there’s luck.”
The authors of the study anticipate that the findings of the investigation will help create treatments for the world’s aging population.
“Centenarians, and their exceptional longevity, provide a ‘blueprint’ for how we might live more productive, healthful lives,” said senior author George J. Murphy, associate professor of medicine at Boston University’s school of medicine.