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When we heard of the death of Florence Green, the final surviving veteran of World War I, many people stopped and thought about the old people who are our living links to history. Robert Krulwich at NPR has a list of people and stories that span a lot of years, like the guy he met in 1973 who recalled living near Rasputin, the mad monk of Imperial Russia.
How could somebody talking to me in a diner on 7th Avenue have also talked to somebody that ancient? It just didn’t seem possible. Yet the old guy said, “Rasputin and my dad were friends. He used to come over for tea.”
I thought about it. Rasputin was assassinated in 1916. A 70-year-old man in 1973 would have been 13 when Rasputin was alive. It was not inconceivable that this guy had actually met Rasputin.
Other stories involve an eyewitness to the Lincoln assassination who appeared on television, Civil War widows who saw the 21st century, and the man who met both President John Quincy Adams and President John Kennedy. Link -via Breakfast Links
Karam and Kartari Chand of Bradford, England, recently celebrated their 86th wedding anniversary. They married when Kartari was just 13 and Karam a few years older.
Karam Chand was born in a small rural village in the Punjab in northern India in 1905.
His family worked in farming and, in keeping with the custom of the time, he married at a young age.
His bride Kartari was born in the same district in 1912. According to their passports, that currently makes Mr Chand 106 and his wife 99 years old.
They wed in a typical Sikh ceremony in December 1925 and have just celebrated their 86th year together as a married couple, which they think may qualify them as the UK’s longest married husband and wife.
The Chands live with one of their eight children. They also have 27 grandchildren and 23 great grandchildren. Link -via Arbroath
Shopaholics rejoice! Don’t let my wife reads this, but turns out that shopping – frequent shopping no less – is good for your health!
Those who shopped daily were 27% less likely to die, with male daily shoppers 28% less likely to die, compared with female shoppers who were 23% less likely to die.
The authors acknowledge that shopping could be a surrogate for good health to begin with, but suggest that shopping itself may improve health, by ensuring a good supply of food, to maintain a healthy diet, for example.
Frequent shopping among the elderly may not always be about buying things, but about seeking companionship or taking exercise, which is easier to do than more formal exercise that usually requires motivation, they say.
So, let me spin it this way to you: Go shop at the NeatoShop and live longer! Yay! Link
Want to live a long life? A study of 1,500 children born in 1910 revealed the secret of a long life: conscientious habits.
"Most people who live to an old age do so not because they have beaten cancer, heart disease, diabetes, or lung disease; rather, the long-lived have mostly avoided serious ailments altogether," according to Howard S. Friedman and Leslie R. Martin, in their recent book, "The Longevity Project."
"The best childhood personality predictor of longevity was conscientiousness–the qualities of a prudent, persistent, well organized person," according to the two professors (he at the University of California–Riverside, and she at La Sierra University). "Conscientiousness . . . also turned out to be the best personality predictor of long life when measured in adulthood."
Link | The Longevity Project
A naked mole rat named Old Man was found dead last Thursday at his home at the Barshop Institute for Longevity and Aging Studies in San Antonio, Texas. He was believed to be 32 years old. Old Man spent three decades assisting researchers in studying the process of aging. University of Texas at San Antonio physiology professor Rochelle Buffenstein knew him best.
Old Man was thought to be 11/2 to 2 years old in 1980 when he and 75 of his naked mole rat brethren were captured in a Kenyan sweet potato field — sweet potatoes being one of the mole rat’s favorite dishes.
Buffenstein brought him first to Cape Town University in South Africa, and then to City College of New York in Harlem. The pair arrived in San Antonio in 2007.
Naked mole rats are noted for their longevity with an average lifespan of 26 years. Other rodents live for two to four years. This makes them particularly useful for aging studies. Naked mole rats do not develop cancer. They develop plaque in their brains as they age like Alzheimer’s patients, but they do not display cognitive decline like humans do. Scientists are trying to find out why. Among the long-lived research subjects at the institute, Old Man stood out from the rest.
Even in his old age, Old Man remained an alpha male in his colony. Come feeding time, Old Man was served a special cereal that he loved and that Buffenstein imported from South Africa.
“He’d wrap his body around the bowl and eat until he was full,” she said. “The other rats would wait until he was finished before they ate.”
He also continued to mate with the colony’s breeding female right to the end. About the only outward sign of his advancing age was the sarcopenia, or loss of muscle mass, he developed about five years ago.
Tissue samples will be studied to determine the cause of death. Buffenstein is sure of one thing -it wasn’t cancer. Link -Thanks, Richard Marini!
(Image credit: Helen L. Montoya)
Can you live to be 100 years old? Your genes might tell the story.
A newly discovered suite of 150 “long life” variants in about 70 genes allows scientists to guess, with 77 percent accuracy, whether a person can live into their late 90s or longer, a new study says.
These long-life gene variants, the authors speculate, may suppress genes associated with ailments often linked to aging, such as dementia and heart problems.
“This is just a genetic predisposition,” cautioned study leader Paola Sebastiani, a biostatistician at the Boston University School of Public Health. “It doesn’t mean that you’re going to live to be a hundred. Many things can happen in life.”
The research may lead to longer lives, but that would be so far in the future that our best bet is still a healthy lifestyle. Link
You may have heard of the longevity of people who live on Okinawa or Sardinia. These areas of the globe where locals are reknowned for living long are collectively named ‘blue zones.’
Now researcher Dan Buettner and his team have discovered a new blue zone, the tiny Greek island called Icaria located in the North Aegean Sea. 1 in 3 citizens of Icaria live to the age of 90, the highest such concentration in the world. They also have a 20 percent lower rate of cancer, 50 percent lower rate of heart disease, and no dementia.
Our life spans are about 20 percent dictated by our genes, Buettner says. The rest is lifestyle. People in Icaria live in mountain villages that necessitate activity every day. “They have gardens,” he says, for example. “If they go to church, if they go to their friends’ house — it always occasions a small walk. But that ends up burning much more calories than going to a gym for 20 minutes a day.”
“They also have a diet that’s very interesting,” Buettner continues. “It’s very high in olive oil; it’s very high in fruits and vegetables.” It’s also very high in greens; about 150 kinds of veggies grow wild on the island. “These greens have somewhere around 10 times the level of antioxidants in red wine.”
And though they live on an island, Icarians don’t eat much fish. Buettner says pirates pushed the culture up in the highlands and villagers couldn’t depend on the sea as much as might be expected.
Particularly unusual to this new blue zone are the villagers’ drinking habits. Tea drinking, that is. Icarians drink herbal teas every day, morning and night, Buettner says. This seems to be one of their secrets to longer living
From the Upcoming 
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Sakhan Dosova of Karaganda in northern Kazakhstan has documents that say she will celebrate her 130th birthday on Friday. Census officials discovered that her documents all agree that her birthdate is March 27, 1879. Records show she was on the books as 47 years old when a census was taken under the Stalinist regime in 1926.
Nailya Dosayeva, head of social and demographical department of Karaganga regional statistics bureau, said there is no doubt that her claim is authentic.
‘Sakhan Dosova was found during our census held in February and March. She has an old passport and documents which are genuine, and based on these we can judge her age as being correct.’
The local mayor Islam Togaybayev went to visit her ‘to personally congratulate her on such an achievement and show his respect’, said his spokesman.
Other officials are not so sure.
Some Kazakh bureaucrats want more checks to be done to ascertain the accuracy of her claim, pointing out that birth records in Kazakhstan in the 19th century are notoriously unreliable.
‘We can see that this is turning into a big story and for the sake of our country, we need to be sure her claim is correct,’ said one official.
According to one version of her life, she must have given birth to several children over the age of 60, he said.
‘There is no doubt she is very old. But is she really 130? Or was there a white lie long ago which was never corrected? We need to find out.’
Dosova attributes her longevity to a sense of humor. Link -via Unique Daily
If chipper and optimistic people annoy you, here’s a finding that will make you hate them even more: they’ll outlive everyone else …
A study of 100,000 women presented at the American Psychosomatic Society’s annual meeting Thursday found a strong correlation between optimism and a person’s risk for cancer-related death, heart disease and early death.
Researchers surveyed the personality traits of middle-age women in 1994 as part of the Women’s Health Initiative study run by the National Institutes of Health.
Eight years later, researchers found that the self-reported optimistic women were less likely to have died for any reason and had a 30 percent lower death rate from heart disease.
Meanwhile, women scoring high on the hostile scales had a higher general death rate and a 23 percent greater risk of dying from a cancer-related condition by the end of the study.
