Abstract
People are living longer, but lifespan increase does not coincide with a boost in health-span. Thus, improving the quality of life of older people is a priority. Centenarians reach extreme longevity in a relatively good health status, escaping or delaying fatal or strongly invalidating diseases. Therefore, studying processes involved in longevity is important to explain the biological mechanisms of health and well-being, since knowledge born from this approach can provide valuable information on how to slow aging. We performed the present study in a well characterized very homogeneous sample of 173 people from Western Sicily, to update existing literature on some phenotypic aspects of aging and longevity and to propose a range of values for older people. We classified 5 age groups, from young adults to centenarians, to understand the age and gender-related variations of the different parameters under study. We collected anamnestic data and performed anthropometric, bioimpedance, molecular, haematological, oxidative, and hematochemical tests, adopting a multidimensional analysis approach. An important evidence of the present study is that there are differences related to both age and gender in several biomarkers. Indeed, gender differences seem to be still poorly considered and inadequately investigated in aging as well as in other medical studies. Moreover, we often observed comparable parameters between young and centenarians rather than non-agenarians and centenarians, hypothesizing a sort of slowdown, almost followed by a reversal trend, in the decay of systemic deterioration. The study of centenarians provides important indications on how to slow aging, with benefits for those who are more vulnerable to disease and disability. The identification of the factors that predispose to a long and healthy life is of enormous interest for translational medicine in an aging world.
Highlights
Epidemiological data from various populations clearly suggest that centenarians represent an extraordinary and informative model for identifying the mechanisms responsible for healthy aging, in most studies the genetic, demographic and phenotypic characteristics of longevity are discussed separately [7,22,28,29,30,31]
Anthropometric, molecular, haematological, oxidative, and hematochemical data of a homogeneous population of Sicilian centenarians and nonagenarians studied together with young adults, adults and older adults to have an adequate and matched number of controls
The information reported should be useful to understand the mechanisms that allow us to reach an advanced age in acceptable health conditions and to provide information on the reference ranges in older adults and long living individuals (LLIs), taking into account the gender
Summary
According to United Nations estimates, in 2015 in the world there were nearly half a million centenarians, more than four times as many as in 1990 (https://population.un.org/wpp/). Improving the quality of life of older people and slowing aging is becoming a priority due to the continuous increase in the number of this population [3]. This makes the studies of the processes involved in longevity of great importance. Three distinct morbidity profiles have been described, exploring the timing of most common age-related diseases in a sample of centenarians: the “escapers’’, who do not succumb to any age-related diseases; the “delayers’’, who postpone the onset of agerelated diseases; and the “survivors’’, who outlived with disease [6]
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