According to data from two large studies spanning thirty years, optimistic people live considerably longer than pessimists. Read the rest

Dr. Shigeaki Hinohara died last month at age 105. Over his long life, he helped many others achieve long lives by popularizing annual medical checkups and by sharing what he knew, which was one of his tips for longer living: Read the rest

Yasutaro Koide, at 112, was the oldest man alive before he died Monday in Nagoya, Japan.

His death came only months after being confirmed by Guinness as such, and it leaves the situation of his successor unclear. Susannah Mushatt Jones, 116, of Brooklyn, however, remains the world's oldest person. France's Jeanne Calment, who was 122 years old at his death in 1997, is recognized as the longest-lived person on record.

Born in 1903, Koide was born to a world without human flight, ice cream cones, or the Model T. According to USA Today, he said that his secret was "not to smoke, drink or overdo it." Read the rest

Whole genome sequencing has not found any single gene variation responsible for extreme longevity, according to a paper published in PLOS ONE:

We have sequenced the genomes of 17 supercentenarians (over 110 years of age) to see if we could uncover the genetic basis for their extreme longevity. We analyzed rare protein-altering variants, but found no strong evidence for enrichment of either a single variant or a single gene harboring different variants in female Caucasian supercentenarians compared to controls.

The full genomic sequences have been published, allowing other researchers to build on the data set.

  Read the rest

Slate is doing a series of articles on life expectancy in the United States, both how it's changed and why. It kicks off with a piece that gives a broad overview of the medical and public health factors involved in our increased longevity — from clean water and the germ theory of disease, to generally increased wealth and nutrition, to vaccination. But author Laura Helmuth also offers up a morbidly fun challenge, asking you to think about how many times you might have already died had you been born before all these revolutionary changes happened.

It’s a fun conversation starter: Why are you not dead yet? It turns out almost everybody has a story, but we rarely hear them; life-saving treatments have become routine. I asked around, and here is a small sample of what would have killed my friends and acquaintances:

On May 27, Jiroemon Kimura became the last living man to have been born in the 19th century. On Wednesday, he died at 116, the oldest man who ever lived. Read the rest

I really enjoyed reading a recent story in The New York Times Magazine about attempts to understand extreme longevity — the weird tendency for certain populations to have larger-than-average numbers of people who live well into their 90s, if not 100s.

Written by Dan Buettner, the piece focuses on the Greek island of Ikaria, and, in many ways, it's a lot like a lot of the other stories I've read on this subject. From a scientific perspective, we don't really understand why some people live longer than others. And we definitely don't understand why some populations have more people who live longer. There are lots of theories. Conveniently, they tend to coincide with our own biases about what we currently think is most wrong with our own society. So articles about extremely long-lived populations tend to offer a lot of inspiring stories, some funny quotes from really old people, and not a lot in the way of answers.

Buettner's story has all those elements, but it also proposes some ideas that were, for me, really thought provoking. After spending much of the article discussing the Ikarian's diet (it's low in meat and sugar, high in antioxidants, and includes lots of locally produced food and wine) and their laid-back, low-stress way of life, Buettner doesn't suggest that we'll all live to be 100 if we just, individually, try to live exactly like the Ikarians do. In fact, he points out that other communities of long-lived individuals actually live differently — Californian Seventh-Day Adventists, for instance, eat no meat at all and don't drink, and they live with the normal stresses of everyday American life. Read the rest