Ingrid van Dijk
Associate senior lecturer
Increasing number of long-lived ancestors associates with up to a decade of healthspan extension and a healthy metabolomic profile in mid-life
Author
Summary, in English
Globally, the lifespan of populations increases but the healthspan is lagging behind. Previous research showed that survival into extreme ages (longevity) clusters in families as illustrated by the increasing lifespan of study participants with each additional long-lived family member. Here we investigate whether the healthspan in such families follows a similar quantitative pattern using three-generational data from two databases, LLS (Netherlands), and SEDD (Sweden). We study healthspan in 2,143 families containing index persons and two ancestral generations, comprising 17,539 persons with 25 follow-up years. Our results provide strong evidence that an increasing number of long-lived ancestors associates with up to a decade of healthspan extension. Further evidence indicates that members of long-lived families have a delayed onset of medication use, multimorbidity and, in mid-life, healthier metabolomic profiles than their partners. We conclude that in longevity families, both lifespan and healthspan are quantitatively linked to ancestral longevity, making such families highly suitable to identify protective mechanisms of multimorbidity.
Department/s
- Department of Economic History
- Centre for Economic Demography
Publishing year
2022-09-08
Language
English
Document type
Preprint
Publisher
bioRxiv
Topic
- Gerontology, specializing in Medical and Health Sciences
Status
Published
Project
- An Age-Old Advantage? Healthy aging in two centuries of Swedish and Dutch long-lived families (1813-2021). Riksbankens Jubileumsfond.