Article: Blood biomarker profiles and exceptional longevity.
I was recently watching a documentary series on the infamous ‘Blue Zones’ of the world. Blue zone was coined by researchers who explored parts of the world in which a higher than expected proportion of a local population lived to the age of 100 (centenarians).
The original blue zone was a province in Sardinia, Italy (Nuoro). Others were subsequently added:
Okinawa Prefecture, Japan
Nicoya Peninsula, Costa Rica
Icaria, Greece
Loma Linda, California
Truth be told, I find Loma Linda to be a tad unconvincing, but this is purely based on what I saw in the documentary - so it’s a rather uninformed position.
Most of the time when people are having debates about blue zones, and how it is these people live to 100, they argue over diet. Some use it as an opportunity to shill vegetarian diets.
In my opinion, diet is not the most important element of the blue zone life.
Murata et al
The article linked above involves an analysis of a cohort of patients that have been previously followed as part of the Apolipoprotein Mortality Risk (AMORIS) cohort.
This cohort includes over 800,000 people from Sweden who had regular check-ups and blood markers drawn from 1985 to 1996. Because of Sweden’s ability to log and track their populations health, AMORIS has enabled longitudinal follow-up on the health status of these people until the year 2020.
In their sub-analysis, Murata et al included those born between 1893 to 1920. These participants were between the age of 64 to 99 years at the time of their blood measurements.
Murata et al included 44, 636 participants in their final analysis.
13.1% died before the age of 80
47.6% died between 80 and 90
36.6% died between 90 and 100
2.7% lived over the age of 100
Takeaway #1 As we review the biomarkers of this population, we see that the authors categorized the data as “centenarian” and “non-centenarian.”
But, when you see non-centenarian I don’t want you to think ‘oh these people were unhealthy or died young.’ Instead, I want you to appreciate that in this category 86% of the participants lived over the age of 80. Even more impressive, 37% lived over the age of 90!
Chronic Illness
The next set of data I want to draw your attention to are the baseline characteristics of this cohort, taken from Table 1.
The left-handed column are centenarians, and the right hand are non-centenarians.
One of the most common pieces of medical propaganda is the justification for ‘chronic disease.’ Often times, we like to blame the fact that life-expectancy is higher today and thus we are more prone to chronic illness simply as a result of aging (or senescence). This is also used as justification for the rates of cancer.
Right off the bat, we see that 88.2% of centenarians had no chronic disease. You may claim that there is a selection or survivorship bias going on here. But, this is not the point I am trying to make.
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