Doctors tell us that a healthy lifestyle and easygoing attitude will help to extend our time on earth. True as this may be, this is only one side of the coin. Researchers say that 30% of aging is genetically based, and they’re closing in on some of the genes that may extend our lifespan.

A team led by Paola Sebastiani and Thomas T. Perls of Boston University looked at the genomes of over a thousand men and women who were born between 1890 and 1910 and compared them with over 1200 of people born after. The researchers studied the genetic markers and were able to predict which came from people aged over 100, with 77 percent accuracy.

“Seventy-seven percent is very high accuracy for a genetic model,” said Sebastiani. “But 23 percent error rate also shows there is a lot that remains to be discovered.”

This certainly does not mean that people can begin to disregard their health and still expect to live for as long as they would have with proper diet and exercise. However, genetic signatures were found to correlate both with longevity in life and the ability to resist diseases that are associated with old age.

The researcher believes that the older a person gets, the more likely their genes have become a contributing factor to their age and that studying these genes may help doctors plan a strategy that will plan for treatments down the road.

“We found that what predisposes to a long life is not lack of disease associated variants, but the presence of protective variants,” she said at a briefing. They also found that men are more susceptible to age related diseases, and die more readily when they contract such illnesses. Only 15% of people over 100 in the US are male.

The key word here is “preparation.” With knowledge from this research, individuals will certainly be able to increase their longevity with lifestyle changes that are in favor of certain aspects of health.

With a greater awareness of health issues, and without any world war to fight, baby boomers and beyond will probably have great numbers of people living over 100.

View a previously written post by Mouli Cohen about Research.