Secrets Of The World's Oldest People (VIDEO)
React
Follow
While quite a bit of buzz recently has focused on centenarians, or people who are 100 years or older, there's an even smaller group of people who have gone beyond this measure.
Currently, there are 88 known "supercentenarians" -- or people who are at least 110 years old -- living around the world. And what do they have in common? "Practically nothing," UCLA's Dr. Stephen Coles, a longevity researcher who focuses particularly on this group, told reason.tv in an interview about his work.
If anything, many of them indulged in seemingly bad health habits, including smoking and not taking vitamins. But the one commonality, according to Dr. Coles, seems to be a genetic predisposition toward longevity -- they often had parents, siblings and other relatives who had lived for a long time.
So what does that say for the average person? That's one of the topics that Dr. Coles explores, along with how medical advances may be able to bring more people to supercentenarian status -- and potentially even take supercentenarians themselves to new age benchmarks.
=================================================
huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/19/supercentenarian_n_879886.html?ref=tw
Posted: 06/19/11 11:00 AM ET