Living Past 90 Doesn't Doom You to Disease, Disability

What if you could live well into your 90s and still be in good health?

A new study suggests that may be possible, particularly if you have good genes.

"Chronic disease is not an inevitable part of aging," said Dr. Sofiya Milman, an assistant professor of medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City. "An extended period of good health can accompany a long life span and is an achievable goal."

Milman is one of the authors of a U.S. National Institutes of Health-funded study on aging.

Americans are living longer than ever. In 2014, the average life expectancy at birth had reached nearly 79 years, according to the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics. A century earlier, it was just slightly over 54 years.

But gains in "health span—the period of time that people live in good health—have not kept pace with longevity," the study authors noted. Rather, longer life expectancy has been associated with greater disability.

Of course, some people are beating the odds, outliving their average life expectancy, surviving near the limit of the human life span and spending fewer years sick and disabled.

How do they do it?

Using data from two previous studies, researchers from Albert Einstein and Boston University examined whether people experienced similar delays in the onset of disease and disability before death.

One study, the Longevity Genes Project, included Ashkenazi Jewish people who at age 95 were living independently. For comparison, the study included a group of somewhat younger Ashkenazi Jews with no parental history of longevity.

The research team also drew data from the New England Centenarian Study, which included 100 year olds living in eight towns in the Boston area, as well as in England, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. It also included people without a family predisposition of exceptional longevity for comparison.

Researchers then compared the health of 439 long-lived people and their 696 somewhat younger counterparts, aged 53 to 93, from the Longevity Genes Program with the health of 1,498 long-lived participants and 302 comparison participants, aged 49 to 89, from the New England Centenarian Study.

Source: healthywomen.org