THE NEW YORK TIMES – Maria Branyas Morera, then the world’s oldest living person, had one last request before she died. “Please study me,” she said to Dr. Manel Esteller, chairman of genetics at the University of Barcelona’s School of Medicine.
A resident of Olot, Spain, she died last summer at age 117.
Dr. Esteller and a large cohort of colleagues fulfilled her wish. They examined Ms. Branyas’s blood, saliva, urine and stool to try to learn why she lived so long.
The answer in part, according to a paper published Wednesday in the journal Cell Reports Medicine, is that she took care of herself. She followed a Mediterranean diet, did not smoke or drink, and walked an hour a day until the early 2000s when doing so became too difficult.
And she won the genetic lottery with variants that, the researchers said, could predict longevity. These genetic variants have been reported to protect against common risk factors like high cholesterol levels, dementia, heart disease and cancer.
“She had cells that seemed younger than her age,” Dr. Esteller said.
The microbes that lived in and on her body, or her microbiome, are associated with low levels of inflammation, he added. Her microbiome had an abundance of a type of beneficial bacteria, Bifidobacterium, whose growth can be spurred by bacteria in yogurt. Ms. Branyas ate three yogurts a day.
“High levels of inflammation are related to advanced aging,” Dr. Esteller said.
Immaculata De Vivo, a molecular geneticist at Harvard University who was not involved in the study, said the researchers’ explanations for Ms. Branyas’s longevity were “scientifically reasonable.”
But, she cautioned, “it’s always important to be careful when interpreting results from individual cases, as opposed to large, well-controlled population studies” …
