Tests on supercentenarian give clues to good health for long life

The nonagenarian actor Dame Joan Collins may have been on to something when she declared “age is just a number”.

- Ian Sample

The deepest dive yet into the biology of a supercentenarian has revealed that even extreme old age can be reached without the brain necessarily faltering or the usual illnesses mounting up.

Doctors in Spain conducted an exhaustive suite of tests on Maria Branyas Morera, who was the world’s oldest person before she died aged 117 last year.

They discovered that while her body showed clear signs of extreme old age, a number of biological factors protected her from the diseases that normally plague the final years of life.

“The common rule is that as we age we become sicker, but she was an exception, and we wanted to understand why,” said Dr Manel Esteller at the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute in Barcelona. “For the first time, we’ve been able to separate being old from being sick.”