Nonagenarian actor Dame Joan Collins may have been on something when she said “age is only a number”.
The deepest dive to date in the biology of a SuperCentenarian has revealed that even extreme old age can be reached without the brain that necessarily flickers or the usual diseases that are rising.
Doctors in Spain carried out a full suite of tests on Maria Branyas Morera, who was the oldest person in the world before his death at 117 last year.
They discovered that even if his body showed clear signs of extreme old age, a number of biological factors have protected him from diseases that normally afflict the last years of life.
“The common rule is that as we age, we become more sick, but it was an exception and we wanted to understand why,” said Dr. Manel Esteller at the Josep Carreras Leukemia Research Institute in Barcelona. “For the first time, we were able to separate being old to be sick.”
In the years preceding her death, Branryas invited doctors to study it to find out why she had reached such ripe old age. Born in San Francisco in 1907, Branryas moved to Catalonia in 1915 and survived two world wars, the Spanish civil war and the cocovated pandemic, recovering from the 113 -year -old virus.
Esteller and his colleagues shot blood, saliva, urine and samples of stools taken a year before Branryas’ death to build a detailed image of his biology. The tests immersed themselves in its genetics and the extent to which different genes were on and off; Varieties and protein levels in his blood, degradation products of reactions in his body and the diversity of microbes in his intestine.
Among a mine of discoveries, they found that the protective caps called telomeres at the ends of the branrya chromosomes were exceptionally short, a clear sign of old age in its cells. Its immune system has also shown signs of old age, was subject to inflammation, and it had acquired changes that lead to leukemia.
But Branryas was apparently well protected. Telomeres are shortened whenever the cells are divided, and its own were so short that they may have protected it from cancer by limiting the quantity that cells have continued to divide, Esteller said.
A look closely on her DNA revealed variants of genes that protected her heart and brain cells from disease and dementia. It had low levels of inflammation throughout the body, which reduced its risk of cancer and diabetes, and an effective metabolism of cholesterol and fat. “All of this is essential because they are linked to typical diseases in the elderly and they kill you at the end,” said Esteller.
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The team then turned into epigenetic clocks, which examine gene expression models, to assess the biological age of Branryas. “She was at least 10 to 15 years younger [than her chronological age]”Said Esteller. His intestinal microbiome was also very young for his age with a lot of bifidobacterium, which is also considered to be beneficial for health.
However, his long life was not quite genetics. Branryas was not overweight, ate a lot of yogurt and did not smoke or drink. She had a good social life with friends and a family nearby. Everything surely helped, said Esteller.
He hopes that the richness of information will help scientists develop new treatments to keep people healthy in old age. “We can develop drugs to reproduce the effects of good genes,” he said. “Maria’s parents gave him very good genes, but we cannot choose our parents.”
Professor João Pedro of Magalhães at the University of Birmingham, said: “These aberrant values in longevity could give an overview of the way of aging more graciously. If we could understand which specific genes are associated with extreme human longevity and healthy age, it could provide clues to mechanisms for aggression as well as drug targets.
