117-year-old Maria Branyas Morera had the distinction of being the oldest person in the world before she passed away last summer. One of her final wishes in the twilight of her life was for doctors to study her. “Please study me,” she said to Dr. Manel Esteller who is the chairman of genetics at the University of Barcelona’s School of Medicine.
Now her long-held desire has been fulfilled and researchers have gained some truly fascinating insights into what contributed towards the supercentenarians’ incredibly long lifespan. A resident of Olot, Spain, she had a relatively healthy lifestyle: She ate a normal Mediterranean diet, walked everyday up until the early 2000s, never smoked or drank and had a good social life. While these factors contributed to her good health, the latest research has revealed that the reasons for her extremely long life span went beyond these epigenetic factors; that is to say, Maria had won a stunning genetic lottery at birth.
Dr Esteller and his team examined her saliva, blood, urine and stool to unlock the secrets in her genetic code and published their findings in a paper for the journal Cell Reports Medicine. This is the most thorough and intensive look into a supercentenarian’s biology till date and the findings are incredible. “She had cells that seemed younger than her age,” Dr. Esteller said. Maria exceeded the average life expectancy of women in her home by more than 30 years.
What the study revealed
One major discovery was that extreme old age can be attained without the brain degrading or other age-related illnesses mounting up and this was due to Maria Branyas Morera’s unique biology. At the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute in Barcelona, Dr Manel Esteller said, “The common rule is that as we age we become sicker, but she was an exception and we wanted to understand why…For the first time, we’ve been able to separate being old from being sick.”
A number of biological components in her body prevented her from being bogged down by the usual diseases which would otherwise catch up to a person of her age and plague them in the last years of their lie. The tests performed on her involved finding out which genes were switched on or off; the diversity of microbiomes in her gut, the levels of proteins in her blood, and the breakdown products left in her body after reactions.
Maria’s results painted a picture of a person much younger than her actual age – she had great cardiovascular health, low levels of inflammation, extremely low levels of ‘bad’ cholesterol and very high levels of ‘good’ cholesterol. Scientists also noticed that the caps at the end of her chromosomes, called telomeres were exceptionally short, almost miniscule. While previous studies have connected shorter telomeres with increased risk of death, recent studies show that amongst the extremely old, telomeres are not a useful biomarker of aging.
In fact, having unusually short telomeres may have worked in Maria’s favour. Telomeres usually shorten when cell division occurs and the studies revealed that she had acquired mutations which would have eventually led to leukemia, but her “eroded” telomeres may have protected her from cancer by limiting the amount that cells continued to divide according to Dr Esteller.
Apart from this, a close look at her DNA also revealed that she had rare gene variants which protected her brain and heart from diseases such as dementia, hypertension, diabetes and other serious diseases.
Implications of the study
The doctors and scientists who worked in tandem to publish this study are hopeful for the future. Its potential is enormous and could revolutionise the medical field, allowing for people to age more gracefully and have a higher quality of life in their twilight years. Dr Esteller hopes that the findings of the study will help scientists in developing treatments that will allow the elderly to keep healthy. “We can develop drugs to reproduce the effects of good genes,” he said. “Maria’s parents gave her very good genes, but we cannot choose our parents.”
According to a report by the Guardian, Prof João Pedro de Magalhães at the University of Birmingham, said: “These outliers in longevity could provide insights into how to age more gracefully. If we could figure out which specific genes are associated with extreme human longevity and healthy old age it could provide clues about mechanisms for ageing as well as drugable targets to develop interventions that allow everyone to live longer, healthier lives.”