Living longer linked to shorter period of illness: study

People who live exceptionally long lives may have the additional benefit of shorter periods of illness - sometimes just weeks or months - before death, a new study has found.
In a study of nearly 3,000 people, the onset of illness came decades later in life for centenarians than for their younger counterparts, researchers said.
"Most people struggle with an ever-increasing burden of disease and disability as they age," said Nir Barzilai from Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the US.
"But we found that those who live exceptionally long lives have the additional benefit of shorter periods of illness - sometimes just weeks or months - before death," said Barzilai.

Researchers looked at the health status of centenarians and near-centenarians enrolled in two ongoing studies - the Longevity Genes Project (LGP) and the New England Centenarian Study (NECS).
The LGP recruits healthy, independently living Ashkenazi Jewish people 95 and older from the northeastern US.

For comparison, the LGP includes a group of Ashkenazi Jewish individuals who do not have a parental history of longevity.
The NECS includes participants from North America generally as well as England, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. The NECS comparison group consisted of people aged 58 to 95, researchers said.
The study compared the health status of 483 long-lived LGP participants with 696 LGP comparison individuals 60-94 years old, and the health status of 1,498 long-lived NECS participants with 302 NECS comparison subjects aged 58-95.

For both sets of comparisons, researchers looked at the ages at which individuals developed five major age-related health problems: cancer, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, osteoporosis and stroke.
Analysis showed a consistent pattern of delayed onset of illness in the LGP and NECS centenarian groups compared to their respective comparison groups.
For the long-lived NECS individuals, cancer did not afflict 20 per cent of men until age 97 and women until 99.
In contrast, 20 per cent of NECS comparison participants had developed cancer by age 67 in men and 74 in women.
Results were similar for the LGP: for the long-lived LGP participants, the age at which 20 per cent had developed cancer was delayed to 96 for both sexes, researchers said.

But cancer had affected 20 per cent of LGP control-group males by age 78 and control-group females by 74, they said.
Compared to younger comparison groups, their onset of major age-related disease was delayed, with serious illness essentially compressed into a few years very late in life.
The findings suggest that discoveries made in one group of centenarians can be generalised to diverse populations. And they contradict the notion that the older people get, the sicker they become and the greater the cost of taking care of them, researchers said.
The findings were published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.