That Centenarians are Healthier is Unsurprising
In order to live longer, one needs to be more healthy, less impacted by dysfunction and damage, suffer fewer outright age-related diseases. This is what one sees when assessing centenarians against the average of the oldest populations. Aging is damage, and age-related disease is the manifestation of that damage. Different people age at different rates, largely the consequence of lifestyle choice and environmental factors such as exposure to persistent pathogens. It is also possible that genetic variants become more important in very late life by providing greater resilience, but so far the weight of evidence leans more towards lifestyle choice and luck when it comes to the small number of individuals who do survive to a century of age.
Centenarians exhibit extreme longevity and have been postulated, by some researchers, as a model for healthy aging. The identification of the characteristics of centenarians might be useful to understand the process of human aging. In this retrospective study, we took advantage of demographic, clinical, biological, and functional data of deceased individuals between 2014 and 2020 taken from the Basque Health Service electronic health records data lake. Fifty characteristics derived from demographic, clinical, pharmaceutical, biological, and functional data were studied in the descriptive analysis and compared through differences in means tests. Twenty-seven of them were used to build machine learning models in the predictive analysis and their relevance for classifying centenarians was assessed.
Most centenarians were women and lived in nursing homes. Importantly, they developed fewer diseases, took fewer drugs, and required fewer medical attendances. They also showed better biological profiles, exhibiting lower levels of glucose, hemoglobin, glycosylated hemoglobin, and triglycerides in blood analysis compared with non-centenarians. In addition, machine learning analyses revealed the main characteristics of the profiles associated with centenarians' status as being women, having fewer consultations, having fewer diagnoses of neoplasms, and having lower levels of hemoglobin.