Life expectancy in the longest-lived countries, such as Japan, Italy or Spain, is around 84 years. But there are people who live another thirty more. The Spanish María Branyas, for example, exceeded 117. . And not only do they live longer, but they rarely reach the end with cardiorespiratory problems, Alzheimer’s or cancer and only with the ailments typical of such an advanced age. Science seeks in them the elixir of their extreme longevity from many fronts.
But the scientists still had to cover the southern flank. Almost all of the studies have been carried out with populations from the so-called first world, developed, with access to health services and more genetically homogeneous. Now, the first results of work in Brazil are beginning to be known, a not so developed country, with little access to modern medicine for a large part of the population and with enormous genetic mixing. And surprisingly, with a large number of centenarians and a good number of supercentenarians.
Researchers from the Human Genome and Stem Cell Research Center of the University of São Paulo have gathered the largest sample of people who have passed the age of one hundred (they have already been 160 and counting), among them twenty supercentenarians, aged over 110 years. They have obtained or are obtaining data on their genetics and epigenetics, molecular and cellular analyses, as well as information about their ancestors, behavioral habits and living conditions. In the study they are analyzing all the data of , who was the oldest woman on the planet for a time at 116 years old, until her death last spring. The work also includes the two oldest men on the globe still alive, both 112 years old.
“We are actively recruiting and collecting biological samples from centenarians and supercentenarians in various regions of Brazil,” details researcher Mateus Vidigal, co-author of the ongoing research. The cohort is constantly expanding and they hope to exceed 200 centenarians by mid-year. “Whole genome sequencing has already been completed for a sizable subset of participants, and genomic analyzes are currently ongoing,” adds Vidigal. As the authors write in a commentary published in , “at the time of being contacted by our researchers, some Brazilian supercentenarians appeared lucid and independent in basic daily activities, such as eating.”
According to , Brazil currently has 17 living supercentenarians with validated ages. The figure is much lower than those reported by Japan and the United States. But in addition to the latter’s larger population, which inflates its figures, there is the problem of verification. “Brazil faces a well-recognized challenge in age verification due to historical gaps in the civil registry, which have limited the formal documentation of many long-lived individuals,” Vidigal recalls.
The Brazilian researcher highlights, even so, that his country is disproportionately represented among the oldest men in the world. “In the current world ranking of the five oldest living men, Brazil occupies the first and fourth positions, and until November of last year, the second position was also occupied by a Brazilian.” Therefore, he concludes: “This pattern suggests that the Brazilian population may harbor rare traits associated with longevity that continue to be underrepresented in international data sets.”
They do not have definitive data yet, in fact they are still recruiting participants. But they do give some clues about the origin of their extreme resilience. Three of Brazil’s supercentenarians survived the Covid pandemic before the vaccine existed. Immunological assays have revealed that these individuals had elevated levels of IgG, the most abundant antibody in the immune system, and neutralizing antibodies against SARS-CoV-2, along with plasma proteins and metabolites related to the innate immune response. The convergence of robust immune function with preserved, youth-like protein maintenance systems and systemic physiological integrity makes Brazilian supercentenarians an exceptional model for the study of biological resilience.
Furthermore, unlike supercentenarians in other countries, such as the Japanese or the Catalan María Branyas, here there are no healthy diets like the Mediterranean or Japanese, nor comparable health care. “In this context, the fact that many centenarians and supercentenarians in our study reached extreme ages despite minimal exposure to modern medical interventions suggests that their biological resilience cannot be explained primarily by access to medical care alone,” explains Vidigal. “Instead, these observations support the hypothesis that the exceptional longevity in this cohort is largely due to intrinsic factors, in particular individual genetic components,” adds the Brazilian researcher.
And the explanation could be in the great mixture of Brazilian society. “Although the study is still ongoing, our strongest preliminary lead relates to the high level of genetic admixture in the Brazilian population,” says Vidigal. For the researcher, “this unique genetic landscape could facilitate the convergence of protective variants derived from different evolutionary backgrounds, which could improve biological resilience and promote exceptional longevity.”
The Catalan Manel Esteller, head of the Cancer Epigenetics group, led the study on María Branyas. “Research in human aging is one of the last frontiers in the biomedical field. It highlights the study of very elderly individuals, especially the so-called supercentenarians,” he comments. “The keys to the survival of these people in relatively good health may give us clues about how the rest of the population can age healthily,” adds Esteller, who is not involved in the study of Brazilian supercentenarians.
“Until now, most studies on supercentenarians have been carried out in very defined genetic populations (Northern Europeans, Japanese…), but this causes us to lose a wealth of possible genetic variants that could also contribute to the supercentenarismo“, highlights Esteller. Indeed, this is one of the points highlighted by the authors of the new research: the genetic miscegenation that is at the base of what Brazil is. The Amerindian population would be joined, in successive waves, by the Portuguese, up to four million black slaves, immigrants first from the north and then from the south of Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries and, in parallel, a powerful Asian immigration. In fact, the largest population of origin lives in the South American country. Japanese, after Japan itself. “It is a point that I find very interesting and perhaps by combining DNA from such different origins in variants that give an advantage in health and longevity, we will end up producing a person over 120 years old that we have not yet reliably detected on the planet,” says the Catalan researcher.
