In another paper published January, 2012, we have produced perhaps some of our most exciting findings to date. Early on inThe New England Centenarian Study, we thought that centenarians had to markedly delay or even escape age-related diseases like heart attacks, stroke, diabetes and Alzheimer’s, or else they would never be able to get to their very old ages. In fact, in 1980, a Stanford researcher named James Fries proposed the “Compression of Morbidity” hypothesis which states that as one approaches the limit of human life span, they must compress the time that they develop diseases towards the very end of their life and he proposed that people around the age of 100 do this. However, in 2003 we found that many of our centenarian subjects had age related diseases even before the age of 80 (about 43%, and whom we called “survivors”), after the age of 80 (about 42% and whom we called “delayers”) and lastly, those who had no mortality-associated diseases at age 100 (about 15% and whom we called escapers). The key though was that 90% of all of the centenarians were still independently functioning at the average age of 93 years. Somehow, despite the presence of diseases, people who become centenarians don’t die from those diseases, but rather they are able to deal with them much better than other people and remain independently functioning more than 30 years beyond the age of 60. Therefore it seemed to us that for these study participants, it was not so much the compression of morbidity that was important to their survival, but rather a compression of disability.
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