05/06/2023

Cracking an intriguing secret of centenarians: Why so few are ravaged by Alzheimer’s disease

“We can learn why these people delay or escape Alzheimer’s disease, and use that to come up with drugs to combat it much earlier in a person’s life, so they don’t get the disease,” said Dr. Thomas Perls, a professor at Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine and lead researcher of a new study on centenarians and Alzheimer’s.

Recent Post

Why Do Some People Live to 100—and How?

Thomas Perls, director of BU’s New England Centenarian Study, explains how and why some people live to 100 years

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World’s-oldest person dies

The oldest-known person in the world, Kane Tanaka of Japan, has died at the age of 119. Host Marco Werman discusses

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Want to live to 100? Here’s what the latest longevity research says

You have two choices when pondering how—and whether—you will live a long, healthy life. 

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Latin women won the lottery of longevity

Being Latina and being a woman, Arrecís has a favorable combination to be a centenarian, according to Thomas Perls

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The science that could help you live to 100

In the early 1990s, Tom Perls met two people who would change his life. Perls, then a gerontology fellow at Harvard

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The Secrets of ‘Cognitive Super-Agers’

By studying centenarians, researchers hope to develop strategies to ward off Alzheimer’s disease and slow brain a

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Effect of longevity genetic variants on the molecular aging rate

Evidence that extreme human longevity is heritable is solid: extreme longevity clusters in families, and siblings o

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If You Live to 100, You’ll Need More Than Money

Genetics also play a significant role. The landmark New England Centenarian Study, begun in 1995, identif

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Protein signatures of centenarians and their offspring suggest centenarians age slower than other humans

Using samples from the New England Centenarian Study (NECS), we sought to characterize the serum proteome of 77 cen

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Publications

Study Publications

Identifying omics profiles in centenarians and other species and translating these into preventive and therapeutic strategies

UH2 AG064704

Find all study publications through PubMed

Age Later: Health Span, Life Span, and the New Age of Longevity

by Nir Barzilai,MD

In Age Later, Dr. Barzilai reveals the secrets his team has unlocked about SuperAgers and the scientific discoveries that show we can mimic some of their natural resistance to the aging process. This eye-opening and inspirational book will help you think of aging not as a certainty, but as a phenomenon like many other diseases and misfortunes

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