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2005 NCOA ASA Joint Conference
Sneider, who was soon in lively form, arrived with several of her floral watercolors. “I sold many of them,” she said, for as much as $ 200 . “I'm keeping up to date, and they're on the Internet and are shown all over the world, so I'm happy to that extent.” Her daughter Harriet Robbins explained that Sneider took up painting only eight years ago--at age 95 --after moving to the Willow Valley assisted living facility near Lancaster, Pa. She was unhappy at having to giving up her independence, Robbins continued. “That's how she got into art, I think; she was bored.” 30% DO QUITE WELL
Session moderator Tom Perls, director of the New England Centenarian Study at Boston University's Medical Center, noted that Sneider is not unique in taking up a new, creative endeavor so late in life. He recalled that an early participant in the study, which is funded by the National Institute on Aging, started writing her autobiography at age 92 . Five years later, she worked with a literary agent to pare down her 900 -page manuscript to a more manageable 600 . Perls emphasized, though, that only about 30 % of the roughly 70,000 centenarians in the United States are doing quite well, without some degree of cognitive impairment or other functional disability. Among centenarians, Perls said, about 50 % reside in nursing homes, 15 % live by themselves and 35 % either live with someone or in assisted living. He noted, though, that 90 % of those in his study who reach age 100 live independently until the average age of 92 . “What the centenarians have done for me is disprove the idea that the older you get the sicker you get,” he said. Perls, a coauthor of Living to Be 100 : Lessons in Living to Your Maximum Potential at Any Age (New York City: Basic Books, 1999 ), stressed that in spite of researchers' early efforts to identify common factors among centenarians that might hold lessons for the overall population, few have emerged. One, he said, is humor: “We wonder if that's part of some interesting personality traits that are conducive to managing stress well.” During the Philadelphia session, the audience chuckled when Evelyn “Tootie” Yeager, age 101 , of nearby Walnut Port, quipped, “If the Phillies were playing today, I wouldn't be here.” Her daughter, Jane Wolfe, 63 , commented, “My mother has a sense of humor all the time. She keeps everybody in the family smiling.”
Scientists studying whether an active mind helps forestall the onset of cognitive impairments might look to Alan Hopenwasser of Philadelphia, age 102 . A survivor of the Holocaust in World War II, Hopenwasser, who led the audience in a chorus of Hava Nagila , speaks four languages. COMPLEX FACTORS Generally, though, Perls said, centenarians “tend to be a very heterogeneous group.” He said that when the New England Centenarian Study began in 1994 , “we had all kinds of hypotheses about years of education, socioeconomic status, access to healthcare, all the things that we as gerontologists equate with more longevity. But this group is all over the place.” Education among participants ranges from those with Ph.D.s to others who got as far as the eighth grade. Some were born with a silver spoon in their mouths; others entered life in extreme poverty. Some, like 100 -year-old Alden Cressy of Whiting, N.J., have healthful secrets to their longevity--“oatmeal that hasn't been cooked. It's milk and oatmeal,” he told conference-goers. Yet, others have a decidedly different formula. Yeager said her secret has been to drink Coke regularly since she was in her 20 s. The complex interplay of genetics, environmental and other factors might require extremely large epidemiological studies to tease out subtle elements contributing to extreme longevity, Perls said, “and that's just not possible with this group because they're so rare.” For example, he said, growing up in harsh environs, such as Nova Scotia, could actually be an advantage, fostering hearty physiologies. In fact, he said, scientists have observed that the prevalence of centenarians in a belt running through the Dakotas and Minnesota up through Nova Scotia is about one per 5,000 in the population--twice that of the population of New England. Other pockets of increased centenarian prevalence exist in places as far-flung as Sardinia, Italy, and, possibly, Okinawa, he said, “and we're not sure why.” Regardless of centenarian findings, Perls said, evidence is emerging suggesting that people can make choices affecting their longevity. For instance, the Adventist Health Study at California's Loma Linda University found that members of the Adventist faith with good lifelong habits, such as maintaining healthy diets, exercising, practicing religion, not smoking and so on, had an average life expectancy of 88 years--about 10 years more than the United States population as a whole. Most of the added years, he said, are healthy ones with limited illness and disability. GENDER AND FAMILY “The vast majority of centenarians are women,” Perls said-- 85 % compared with the 15 % of men age 100 or older. “Paradoxically, though, the men tend to be in much better shape than the women,” he added. Regarding aging, he said, overall women “are by no means the weaker of the sexes; they're much stronger, actually.” He surmised that because women tend to handle illness better than men, they might live with their conditions long enough to incur more chronic disease and disability. Men who superannuate to 100 , though, “have to be in spectacular shape,” he said.
A surprising finding, Perls said, is that women who have a child after age 40 stand a greater chance of living to 100 . About 20 % percent of centenarian women have borne children after 40 , he said, compared with about 5 % of other women from the same generation. He qualified that the correlation should not prompt people to “go jump in the hay. It's probably a marker of the reproductive system aging very slowly, so the rest of the body is, too.” Perls continued, “Living to 100 and older runs very strongly in families. He cautioned, though, “Just because it runs in families doesn't necessarily mean it's all genetic. Family members have a lot of things in common besides those genes,” such as smoking less than others or becoming more educated. Centenarians also tend to experience little or no illness, but there are exceptions. On the Joint Conference stage, Barbara Jennings recounted the survival of her father, Alden Cressy, age 100 , following his diagnosis with tuberculosis in 1948 . She said Cressy, now of Whiting, N.J., was actually very close to death and spent two years recovering at the Glen Garner Sanitarium. “He has one lung that they collapsed because of it,” she added. One result is that he stopped smoking cigarettes. PARENTS’ FOOTSTEPS Those who reach triple-digit longevity also tend to “follow in their parents' footsteps,” Perls said. His research team has examined the adult children of the centenarian-study participants, and “we've demonstrated they have 60 % reduced rates of heart disease, diabetes and stroke, compared to other people born around the same time.” Noting the Britain's Queen Mother died after reaching her 100 th birthday, he sympathized, “Prince Charles--he's just never going to become king, because his mom is going to live forever.” - Paul Kleyman, Editor
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