You know the guy who always says, “Relax! You’ll live longer”? Turns out that he’s right. People who study centenarians have found that very old people have a lot in common. For starters, they take life as it comes.
Centenarians—people who live to be 100 or more—are the fastest growing population group in both the United States and Canada. According to the most recent data available, there were over 84,300 centenarians in the United States in 2007 and more than 4,600 in Canada in 2006.
The Boston University School of Medicine is currently carrying out the N ew
England Centenarian Study, the most comprehensive study in the world of people 100 or older. When you ask Dr. Thomas Perls, a physician and the director of B.U.’s study of aging, how long a human being could conceivably live, here is what he says: “Life span . . . is defined by the age of the oldest living individual. In the case
of humans, that individual was Madame Jeanne Calment. . . . In her later years, every day she lived, she extended the human life span by a day.” So, the answer to the question to Perls appears to be “as long as the oldest person has lived.” That’s all we have to go on.
Calment, of France, was 122 when she died on August 4, 1997. She is the oldest human being ever recorded. (The word “recorded” is important. There are people who claim to be older, but they cannot prove it.) Some would suggest that her longevity was destiny: She came from a family who all reached a ripe old age.
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