(New York Post) Scientists may have found the key to living to 100 and beyond.
Only 0.27% of Americans were 100 or older in 2021, but the rate of people in the US becoming centenarians has nearly doubled in the last 20 years, according to data from the United Nations.
As more people reach this milestone, researchers at Boston University and Tufts Medical Center analyzed the DNA and lifestyles of seven centenarians to seek the fountain of youth.
The scientists studied their peripheral blood mononuclear cells — a broad category of immune cells found in the blood — and determined these centenarians have highly functional immune systems that successfully fought off and recovered from many ailments. The study was published last week in the journal eBioMedicine.
“We assembled and analyzed what is, to our knowledge, the largest single-cell dataset of centenarian subjects that allowed us to define unique features of this population,” senior author Stefano Monti, a Boston University associate professor of medicine, explained in a statement.
Researchers from Boston University and Tufts Medical Center found centenarians have a distinct immune cell type composition.SWNS
A person’s ability to adapt and respond to new infections usually declines with age, as their immune system weakens. This study found the centenarian subjects have a distinct composition of immune cells.
“The immune profiles that we observed in the centenarians confirms a long history of exposure to infections and capacity to recover from them and provide support to the hypothesis that centenarians are enriched for protective factors that increase their ability to recover from infections,” said senior author Paola Sebastiani, director of Tufts’ Center for Quantitative Methods and Data Science.
“We assembled and analyzed what is, to our knowledge, the largest single-cell dataset of centenarian subjects that allowed us to define unique features of this population,” senior author Stefano Monti said in a statement.
Their findings show the proportion of lymphocytes (a type of white blood cell) in the PBMCs of centenarians decreases compared to younger people, but a significant change in composition also occurs.
