Centenarians and Supercentenarians

Definitions

• Centenarians — people who reach 100 years.
• Semisupercentenarians — 105–109.
• Supercentenarians — 110+ (only ~500 verified worldwide at any time).

Verification is non-trivial — documented birth records matter. Some reported clusters have turned out to involve registry errors.

What we know

• Genetics: heritability of lifespan rises with extreme longevity. Loci with strong evidence include FOXO3, APOE, and the CETP VV genotype.
• Compression of morbidity: centenarians often have a shorter period of late-life disability than people who die in their 70s/80s — they are not just “survivors of disease” but often largely disease-free until close to death.
• Children of centenarians show better cardiometabolic profiles in middle age, suggesting a heritable healthspan trajectory.
• Cancer: centenarians have lower lifetime cancer incidence than expected, despite living longer.

Notable cohorts

• New England Centenarian Study (Boston).
• Italian centenarian studies (Sardinia, Calabria).
• Okinawan Centenarian Study.
• Ashkenazi Longevity Genes Project (Einstein College of Medicine).
• Dutch Longevity Study (Leiden).

Limitations of inference

• Centenarian biology is hard to disentangle from extreme survivorship bias.
• Lifestyle data is largely retrospective and self-reported.
• Many studied centenarian populations are aging out of traditional diets and rural living.

Related entries

Healthspan vs lifespan, Blue Zones diet, Nir Barzilai.