Centenarians

Having now celebrated her 100th birthday and just introduced her own line of eyeglasses, Iris Apfel has been around the block a few times and knows what she likes. While her philosophy of dressing has always been “more is more and less is a bore,” she also knows that not…

While not all of us are on track to becoming centenarians, enough of us are that it’s worth studying how people get there and how those with such long lives can live fully and robustly for as long as possible. Only about 1 % of Americans reach age 100 but…

We recently reported that life expectancy appears to be biologically fixed even if recent advances suggest that many live longer. However, it is important to realize that conditions over the last year and a half have somewhat changed the situation. Due to the coronavirus pandemic’s impact, life expectancy in the United…

While Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and solitary scientists toil away at pushing the boundaries of human mortality, a dose of reality was recently interjected into the ongoing conversations about how long humans can live. A multi-national team of scientists just published findings that conclude that aging continues to be a relatively…

For some of us, every birthday that passes and every memory lapse instills a fear of what may come: that is, many of us worry about an inevitable slip in our mental capacity or a slide into the world of dementia. Maybe it “runs in our family” or maybe we’ve…

Congratulations to all of us “older adults:” Today, October 1st, is the International Day of Older Persons, begun 30 years ago by the United Nations. The goal of this celebration is to raise awareness of the issues that older adults confront and to appreciate the contributions that older adults make…