BOSTON (WHDH) - The secret to a long life might be living in the cells of an exceptional group of people. That’s what researchers from Tufts Medical Center and Boston University Medical Schools say after an extensive study of centenarians – or people who live to be 100 years old and beyond.
“This is a rare population of individuals,” said Dr. Tanya Karagiannis of Tufts Medical Center.
Karagiannis says her team’s work has shown that centenarians don’t just avoid disease as they age.
“They have a greater exposure to infections and are able to maintain highly functional and robust immune responses,” Dr. Karagiannis said.
The findings of the study support the team’s initial assumptions about centenarians and their immune cells, but their research hasn’t pinpointed why this is the case.
“We don’t understand the reason behind this, but it supports the idea that centenarians have protective factors that help them recover from infections,” she said.
Dr. Karagiannis says that this information could one day be crucial to developing new ways for people to stay feeling good into their later years.
“We hope that with more research,” she said, “we’ll be able to understand the drivers of extreme longevity, and that can help us toward healthy aging therapeutics and help people at older ages stay healthy as long as possible.”
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