How is it possible that there are people living 95 or more years? What is the secret to reaching 100? What the explanation? Some researchers decided to look for the possible causes of men, and especially women, living so many years and, interestingly, could be related to age when having the last child.
Surely it is not the only factor, and perhaps there is no causal relationship, but in a recent study it has been seen that women who are mothers with more than 33 years could live longer than those who have their last child before 30.
Study Data
The study we discussed was carried out at the Boston University School of Medicine. This is a study that is part of a larger investigation: "Family Study of Long Life", in which 551 families with members who lived to very advanced ages are being genetically analyzed.
For this specific study, a sample of 462 women was used. They noted when the last child conceived naturally was born and then how old women were at death.
They saw that when the mothers were over 33 they had twice as likely to live up to 95 years or more than women whose last child was born before age 30.
But does one thing have to do with another?
This is the big question. As explained, some mothers may decide to wait a little to have the last child to achieve this prolongation of life. The problem is that researchers have not been able to prove causality.
In fact, they suggest that the thing goes a bit the other way around: some women have genetic variations that allow them to have children with a more advanced age, sometimes well past 40 years (naturally). This genetics could be linked to living a longer life.
In other words, they do not live longer because they decide to have children with more than 33 years, but rather, they live longer because they are women with long-lived genetics that, curiously, allows them to be mothers with more years than others.
In the words of Thomas Perls, one of the authors of the study, as they tell us in Medline:
If a woman has these variants, she can reproduce and have children for a longer time, increasing her chances of passing those genes to the next generation ... The natural ability to have a child at an older age probably indicates that a woman's reproductive system ages slowly, and therefore, the same happens with the rest of his body.
Researchers believe that special genetics could explain that 85% of people who live more than 100 years are women.
Other previous studies had found that women who had children after 40 years were four times more likely to live more than 100 years than the others
So, if you are one of those mothers capable of having a child conceived naturally after age 33, know that you could have that genetic variant that would allow you to live longer than the rest.
