What’s the Secret to Living Past 100?


Helen "Happy" Reichert, photo by Jurgen Frank

Do you think living beyond 100 is up to your genes or your lifestyle?

Helen "Happy" Reichert is 108 years old.  She hates salads, veggies, and getting up early.  She enjoys rare hamburgers, chocolate, cocktails, nightlife and smoking.  And . . . she smokes  . . .  a lot.  In an interview with Spiegel International, she says:

"I’ve been smoking for 80 years, all day long, every day.  That’s a whole lot of cigarettes."

We know smoking isn’t good for our health, but why is Helen alive at 108 and living fully?  Apparently, she and other "supercentenarians" are in a class by themselves, especially when it comes to genetics.  But despite Helen’s smoking habit, one study – Boston University’s New England Centenarian Study – says centenarians it has studied does share some characteristics:  The study is the world’s largest sample of centenarians.

Characteristics in Common According to The New England Centenarian Study:

  • Few centenarians are obese. In the case of men, they are nearly always lean.
  •  Substantial smoking history is rare.
  •  A preliminary study suggests that centenarians are better able to handle stress than the majority of people.
  • The study’s finding that some centenarians (~15%) had no significant changes in their thinking abilities disproved the expectation by many that all centenarians would be demented.  Alzheimer’s Disease was not inevitable. Some centenarians had very healthy appearing brains with neuropathological study (we call these gold standards of disease-free aging).5
  • Many centenarian women have a history of bearing children after the age of 35 years and even 40 years. From the New England Centenarian Study, a woman who naturally has a child after the age of 40 has a 4 times greater chance of living to 100 compared to women who do not.6 It is probably not the act of bearing a child in one’s forties that promotes long life, but rather, doing so may be an indicator that the woman’s reproductive system is aging slowly and that the rest of her body is as well. Such slow aging and the avoidance or delay of diseases that adversely impact reproduction would bode well for the woman’s subsequent ability to achieve very old age.
  • At least 50% of centenarians have first-degree relatives and/or grandparents who also achieve very old age, and many have exceptionally old siblings. Male siblings of centenarians have an 17 times greater chance than other men born around the same time of reaching age 100 years and female siblings have an 8½ greater chance than other females also born around the same time of achieving age 100.7
  • Many of the children of centenarians (age range of 65 to 82 years) appear to be following in their parents’ footsteps with marked delays in cardiovascular disease, diabetes and overall mortality.
  • Some families demonstrate incredible clustering for exceptional longevity that cannot be due to chance and must be due to familial factors that members of these families have in common.
  • Based upon standardized personality testing, the offspring of centenarians, compared to population norms, score low in neuroticism and high in extraversion.
  • Genetic variation plays a very strong role in exceptional longevity.