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Younger Moms' Kids Get Longevity Edge
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Page: << Prev | 1 | 2 | 3 He said his wife Natalia came up with a competing theory: That young moms haven't had time to pick up the latent, chronic infections that might in some way impede the long-term health of their offspring. "This might interfere with normal development," Gavrilov said. "So, when the children are born they are superficially healthy but maybe they are not really strong enough to survive to 100."
Patmios said the question of why younger mothers might bear more resilient offspring remains "open, but it's worthy of additional research." She stressed that it has proven extremely tough to get in-depth, reliable data for events that happened over a century ago. "There are a lot of other factors that probably contribute to exceptional longevity which, given the dataset that Dr. Gavrilov has to use, he can't assess," she said.
And what about the longevity of children born to today's moms, who are often postponing first pregnancy to their 30s or even 40s? According to Gavrilov, advances in diet and health care mean American newborns still have a better chance of living out a century than their great-grandparents did.
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"The data shows that there is a steady increase in living to age 100, despite the fact that women are tending to postpone their childbearing years," he said.
More information
For more on extreme longevity, visit the U.S. National Institute on Aging (www.census.gov ).
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Copyright © 2006 ScoutNews, LLC. All rights reserved.
Last updated 4/17/2006
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SOURCES: Leonid Gavrilov, Ph.D., Center on Aging, University of Chicago; Georgeanne Patmios, O.D., acting chief, Population and Social Processes Branch of the Behavioral and Social Research Program, U.S. National Institute on Aging, Bethesda, Md.; March 30-April 1, 2006, presentation, Population Association of America annual meeting, Los Angeles
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