If your parents lived to 100 and beyond, doesn’t that mean you might have inherited some of whatever was keeping them going? There’s a simple transitive property type of logic to that thinking, and according to real medical research, there might be something to it.
A new study published in JAMA Network Open suggests that children of centenarians may inherit some of whatever has kept their parents going far longer than anyone is expected to. Researchers found that people with a parent who reached 100 had significantly lower risks of dying, developing heart disease, or developing high blood pressure.
The study combined data from three long-running research projects in the US and UK, all of which followed thousands of people whose parents either reached exceptionally old ages or died when they were young. At any given age, children of centenarians had a 42 percent lower risk of death, a 33 percent lower risk of cardiovascular disease, and a 32 percent lower risk of high blood pressure.
Children of Centenarians May Have a Built-In Health Advantage, Study Finds
They also seemed to get sick later in life. High blood pressure showed up roughly 5 years later among the children of centenarians, while their average age of death was about three years later than the comparison group. The researchers also try to account for some of the more obvious explanations, like smoking, drinking, exercise, diet, and education, all the factors that combine to create the witch’s brew that determines whether or not a person is going to make it to a century or die before they hit 50.
Still, the adjustments didn’t erase the differences, suggesting lifestyle alone may not explain centenarians’ advantages. Genetics could be at play, but the study wasn’t designed to identify the specific genes responsible.
Just because a centenarian is directly responsible for your life doesn’t mean that you are cleared for a smooth landing into your 100s. There are still factors that crop up that can be unaccounted for, like cancer risk, which was found to not be significantly lower, and evidence for protection against stroke was inconsistent. Living helpfully still matters.
What the study is saying is that some families might be carrying a biological advantage that gives them a better foundational set of building blocks to stay healthier for longer, assuming they don’t do everything in their power to screwed up at some point along the way. Hope studying these families can eventually reveal what those advantages actually are, and maybe find a way to give us all a little bit of whatever they’ve got going on.
The post This Family Trait Could Lower Your Risk of Heart Disease and Early Death appeared first on VICE.
