Three Long-Term Studies Found That Children of Centenarians Were Diagnosed With High Blood Pressure Later
Three Long-Term Studies Found That Children of Centenarians Were Diagnosed With High Blood Pressure Later
On August 26, JAMA Network Open published an article on three observational studies conducted in the United States and the United Kingdom. The authors compared age at first diagnosis and age at death between children of people who had lived to at least 100 and control groups.
Researchers are trying to understand why age-related diseases develop later in some people. One approach is to study families in which the parents lived unusually long lives. Their children may share combinations of genetic and environmental factors associated with later disease onset. The authors examined whether this association was consistent across independent groups of people.
The starting point was a 2017 study from the New York based LonGenity program, which found that cardiovascular disease was less common among children whose parents had lived to at least 95. In the new article, the authors tracked time to diagnosis and death in three groups: LonGenity, the New England Centenarian Study, a US study of long-lived families, and the UK Biobank. Participants in the first two groups regularly completed questionnaires. The UK Biobank links participant data to medical records.
In each group, the researchers recorded age at first diagnosis of high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, stroke, and cancer, as well as age at death. The familial longevity group included people with at least one parent who had lived to 100. In the UK Biobank, each person in this group was matched with a control participant of the same sex, a similar age, and the same level of education.
When the results from all three groups were combined, children of centenarians had lower risks of death, cardiovascular disease, and hypertension, which is elevated arterial blood pressure. Because the authors tested several outcomes at once, they applied a stricter statistical threshold. The association with hypertension remained significant and was observed in all three groups. The model estimated that the first diagnosis of hypertension occurred an average of 5.21 years later and that death occurred 3.12 years later. No association was found for cancer, while the findings for stroke differed among the groups.
Familial longevity may provide a criterion for recruiting participants into new studies that examine which combinations of genetic and environmental factors are associated with later onset of age-related diseases. Three groups with different populations and methods of follow-up have already shown that this pattern is reproducible.