Female Supremacy Articles - Page 6

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This does not mean that having a child in middle age makes a woman live longer. Rather, Perls says, "the factors that allow certain older women to bear children -- a slow rate of aging and decreased susceptibility to disease -- also improve a woman's chances of living a long time. Extending that idea, we argue that the driving force of human life span is maximizing the time during which woman can bear children. The age at which menopause eliminates the threat of female survival by ending further reproduction may therefore be the determinant of subsequent life span."

Closing the Gap

If this is true, then the genes of female centenarians hold the secrets of a longer, healthier life. And these are no ordinary genes. Whether the average person drinks, smokes, exercises, or eats her vegetables adds or subtracts five to ten years to or from her life. But to live an additional 30 years requires the kind of genes that slow down aging and reduce susceptibility to conditions such as Alzheimer's disease, stroke, heart disease, and cancer.

Clues about what those genes are and how they work could come from studying those who survive 100 years or more, Perls believes. The New England Centenarian Study he runs is the only scientific investigation of the oldest oldsters being done in the United States. He has now expanded it to include all centenarians in the city of Boston, about 100 more people.