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Here is a really interesting article on the short tenure enjoyed by most holders of the title of world's oldest person. Here is a cool graphic from article, showing how old all the recent record holders have been, and how long they've reigned: As you can see, since 2000 the oldest living person (invariably a woman) has been between the age of 114 and 117, and they've held the title for a short time relative to the 9 years that Jeanne Calment was at the top. Despite dramatic increases in recent average lifespan, the age of the oldest person alive has remained pretty stable lately: The average age of the oldest-ever people has increased over the past 40 years from around 112 to around 114. --Dean

[Admin Note: Several of these first posts are from other threads. I've collected them here on a thread devoted to "Inspiring Oldsters". --Dean] Sthira, I appreciate your advocacy for the image of centenarians, and I mean them no offense, but I think supercentenarians generally look like crap in photos because they look like crap in real life. They are suffering the ravages of the aging process, and by our hard-wired standards of physical attractiveness, these folks ain't it. Honestly, I expect the photographers are doing their best to make them look ok. But while there may not be many (any?) attractive supercentenarians, there are centenarians who still look quite good. This Pinterest channel has lots of pictures of them. But Pinterest is a PITA, blocking anyone without an account from view its pictures. So I've screen captured several of the most striking (reportedly) centenarians and linked to them below. Pretty impressive, both the individuals and the photography. --Dean

Here is a cogent argument that aging researchers should focus more attention on the oldest of the old, both because it is a growing demographic and because the causing of aging (and eventual death) of the really old are different from the "young old", those in their 60s and 70s who are dying from the usual lineup of chronic diseases (heart disease, cancer, diabetes, etc), and so studying the really old could teach us a lot about the true causes of aging (or causes of true aging?): http://www.longevityreporter.org/blog/2015/9/8/anti-aging-old While the writer does mentioned gunk (amyloid) building up as part of the mechanism of aging in the very old (one of Aubrey's seven deadly sources of damage), overall his argument seems to be in somewhat interesting contrast to Aubrey De Grey's perspective (at least as I've seen him express recently). Aubrey seems to be focusing the efforts of the SENS research projects on reversing the damage that accumulates on the path to our common killers (e.g. genes from bacteria that can break down oxidized cholesterol which leads to heart disease), calling this accumulation of damage the true hallmark and cause of aging (my paraphrasing). Perhaps the author and Aubrey are not that far apart, but I've found Aubrey's blurring the line between aging "proper" and the "diseases of aging" very interesting. Intuitively Aubrey's perspective makes a lot of sense to me: accumulation of damage is just what it means to age, and when enough of it accumulates, it manifests itself as one of the diseases of aging and you die. But at the same time it seems like something other than the diseases of aging are very consistently limiting practical human lifespan to about 115-116 years (with Jean Calmet as an extreme outlier), as if there is something else going on in the background that will eventually get you even if the diseases of aging don't. --Dean

It's not clear whether telomere shortening is a cause or a side-effect of aging, and Aubrey de Grey is concerned that direct manipulation of telomeres to make them longer (i.e. via increased expression of the telomerase enzyme) is likely to be a bad idea due to concern about allowing cancer cells to replicate more readily. But longer leukocyte telomeres do seem to be associated with longevity: study [2] found that centenarians have leukocyte telomeres as long as people who are much younger than themselves (and therefore unlikely from a statistical perspective to make it to 100), and the offspring of centenarians have longer telomeres than age and gender matched offspring of parents who died at a "normal" age. So having longer telomeres might be a sign of healthy aging (I can hear Michael Rae revving up his engines now :)). With this in mind this new study [1] (provided to me by Al Pater - thanks Al !), found that components of a person's diet was predictive of their telomere length 10 years later. From the abstract: The first factor labeled 'prudent dietary pattern' was characterized by high intake of whole grains, seafood, legumes, vegetables and seaweed, whereas the second factor labeled 'Western dietary pattern' was characterized by high intake of refined grain, red meat or processed meat and sweetened carbonated beverages. In a multiple linear regression model adjusted for age, sex, body mass index and other potential confounding variables [including from the full text - income status, smoking status, alcohol consumption status, physical activity and calorie intake, and presence of hypertension, diabetes mellitus or hypercholesterolemia], the prudent dietary pattern was positively associated with [leukocyte telomere length - LTL]. In the analysis of particular food items, higher consumption of legumes, nuts, seaweed, fruits and dairy products and lower consumption of red meat or processed meat and sweetened carbonated beverages were associated with longer LTL. So for what is may be worth (he says, expecting to be corrected and chastised by Michael :) for oversimplifying and ignoring important evidence...), eating what is considered by most to be a healthy diet may help to preserve your telomeres, and improve your chances of healthy aging. --Dean ----------- [1] Eur J Clin Nutr. 2015 Sep;69(9):1048-52. doi: 10.1038/ejcn.2015.58. Epub 2015 Apr 15. Association between dietary patterns in the remote past and telomere length. Lee JY(1), Jun NR(1), Yoon D(2), Shin C(2,)(3), Baik I(1). BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVES: There are limited data on the association between dietary information and leukocyte telomere length (LTL), which is considered an indicator of biological aging. In this study, we aimed at determining the association between dietary patterns or consumption of specific foods and LTL in Korean adults. SUBJECT/METHODS: A total of 1958 middle-aged and older Korean adults from a population-based cohort were included in the study. Dietary data were collected from a semi-quantitative food frequency questionnaire at baseline (June 2001 to January 2003). LTL was assessed using real-time PCR during the 10-year follow-up period (February 2011 to November 2012). RESULTS: We identified two major factors and generated factor scores using factor analysis. The first factor labeled 'prudent dietary pattern' was characterized by high intake of whole grains, seafood, legumes, vegetables and seaweed, whereas the second factor labeled 'Western dietary pattern' was characterized by high intake of refined grain, red meat or processed meat and sweetened carbonated beverages. In a multiple linear regression model adjusted for age, sex, body mass index and other potential confounding variables, the prudent dietary pattern was positively associated with LTL. In the analysis of particular food items, higher consumption of legumes, nuts, seaweed, fruits and dairy products and lower consumption of red meat or processed meat and sweetened carbonated beverages were associated with longer LTL. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings suggest that diet in the remote past, that is, 10 years earlier, may affect the degree of biological aging in middle-aged and older adults. PMID: 25872911 -------------------------- [2] Exp Gerontol. 2014 Oct;58:90-5. doi: 10.1016/j.exger.2014.06.018. Epub 2014 Jun 27. Leukocyte telomere length and prevalence of age-related diseases in semisupercentenarians, centenarians and centenarians' offspring. Tedone E(1), Arosio B(2), Gussago C(3), Casati M(4), Ferri E(3), Ogliari G(3), Ronchetti F(3), Porta A(3), Massariello F(3), Nicolini P(4), Mari D(2). Centenarians and their offspring are increasingly considered a useful model to study and characterize the mechanisms underlying healthy aging and longevity. The aim of this project is to compare the prevalence of age-related diseases and telomere length (TL), a marker of biological age and mortality, across five groups of subjects: semisupercentenarians (SSCENT) (105-109years old), centenarians (CENT) (100-104years old), centenarians' offspring (CO), age- and gender-matched offspring of parents who both died at an age in line with life expectancy (CT) and age- and gender-matched offspring of both non-long-lived parents (NLO). Information was collected on lifestyle, past and current diseases, medical history and medication use. SSCENT displayed a lower prevalence of acute myocardial infarction (p=0.027), angina (p=0.016) and depression (p=0.021) relative to CENT. CO appeared to be healthier compared to CT who, in turn, displayed a lower prevalence of both arrhythmia (p=0.034) and hypertension (p=0.046) than NLO, characterized by the lowest parental longevity. Interestingly, CO and SSCENT exhibited the longest (p<0.001) and the shortest (p<0.001) telomeres respectively while CENT showed no difference in TL compared to the younger CT and NLO. Our results strengthen the hypothesis that the longevity of parents may influence the health status of their offspring. Moreover, our data also suggest that both CENT and their offspring may be characterized by a better TL maintenance which, in turn, may contribute to their longevity and healthy aging. The observation that SSCENT showed considerable shorter telomeres compared to CENT may suggest a progressive impairment of TL maintenance mechanisms over the transition from centenarian to semisupercentenarian age. PMID: 24975295

All: I BELIEVE she is the first person other than Calment to hit that age; I am checking on this and will update. This is yet more significant than it seems; despite Calment's example, it has seemed as if there is some kind of maximum lifespan brick wall around 114 years. Aubrey de Grey's latest editorial pushes back on that, but also refers to recent research that disproves the notion of a "tail" in the Gompertz lifespan curve (exists in fruit flies and some other invertebrates, but is an illusion in mammals), which Michael Rose (mis)interpreted as a "period of immortality" (sic: agelessness) reached after the unleashed disruptive forces of residual antagonistic pleiotropy are exhausted, which could in principle (he argued, in a way I think is rather less than syllogistic even on its premises) be pushed back by tuning gene expression into a more adaptive mode, so that we would stop aging while still in youthful good health. For some stabs at this argument: DOES AGING STOP? BOOK REVIEW BY R. MICHAEL PERRY Cryonics / February 2013 Interview with Dr. Michael R. Rose Cryonics / September 2013 SEPTEMBER 2013 • VOLUME 34:9 http://www.impactaging.com/papers/v1/n5/full/100053.html http://www.kurzweilai.net/how-to-achieve-biological-immortality-naturally http://www.genescient.com/ais-superflies-and-the-path-to-immortality/ Even if you think you can make that argument for flies, however, recent evidence from better data at the extremes of the natural lifespan shows even the premises underlying the argument don't hold in humans or laboratory rodents. http://biomedgerontology.oxfordjournals.org/content/70/1/1 http://paa2015.princeton.edu/uploads/152897 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4318539/ http://longevity-science.org/pdf/Demografie-English-2011.pdf Dr. de Grey has dug even more deeply into these data, and thinks he has identified a novel finding therein, with some quite interesting implications — stay tuned.