The guide

What do people who reach 100 have in common?

By GyroscopeUpdated November 14, 202616 sources

Good habits get most people into their late 80s. Reaching 100 takes those plus genes and luck, which count for far more at the far end. Brothers of people who reached 100 were at least 17 times as likely to reach it themselves. And many of the most famous record ages fall apart once someone checks the birth records.

The story people know is the village. A remote place where everyone eats beans, drinks a glass of wine and walks up hills, and dozens of people live past 100. The habits in that story are mostly good ones. The ages, in many cases, were never checked.

Who lived the longest?

It was Jeanne Calment of Arles, in the south of France. She was born on 21 February 1875 and died on 4 August 1997, at 122 years and 164 days, the greatest fully authenticated age on record.

In 2018 two researchers, Nikolay Zak and Valery Novoselov, claimed that she’d actually died in 1934, and that her daughter Yvonne had taken her identity. The claim was published in 2019. Robine and colleagues answered the same year, concluding that the evidence for her age far outweighed the identity theory, and called for the paper to be retracted. In 2020 one of the authors wrote that a definite conclusion wasn’t possible with the evidence available. Her record still stands.

A picture from daily life

Getting to 85 in good health is like getting to the airport on time. Planning does most of it. Reaching 100 is like the flight leaving on time, the connection holding and your bag coming out first. Planning still helps, and you need a lot of luck as well.

How many people reach 100?

From the 2024 US life table, of people who are 65 now:

Women aged 65

• Reach 9036%
• Reach 1003.4%

Men aged 65

• Reach 9025%
• Reach 1001.5%

The odds rise as you go. A woman who reaches 85 has about a 6% chance of reaching 100, and a man about 3%. Your age’s own page has the full odds.

Do genes decide who reaches 100?

More than they decide who reaches 80. A study of 20,502 Danish, Finnish and Swedish twins born from 1870 to 1910 found that genes had little influence on lifespan before 60, and more after. Across all adult ages, genes explained about 20 to 30% of the differences.

Families show it at the far end. In 444 families of people who reached 100, brothers were at least 17 times as likely to reach 100 themselves, and sisters at least 8 times. The sisters had about half the national death rate at every age. The researchers behind the New England Centenarian Study describe genes counting for more and more past 100, through many gene variants that each have a small effect.

For the ages most people actually reach, habits move more. Is how long you live mostly in your genes?

Are people who reach 100 healthy?

Fewer stayed disease free than you’d think, but most put the big diseases off until late. A study of 424 people aged 97 to 119 sorted them by when the common diseases of aging arrived.

Most of them (87% of the men and 83% of the women) either put off or escaped heart disease, stroke and cancer other than skin cancer until 80 or later, or never had them.

Why do so many record ages fall apart?

In July 2010, police in Tokyo went to the home of Sogen Kato, thought to be the city’s oldest man, who would have been 111. They found his body. He had been dead for 32 years, and his granddaughter was arrested on suspicion of pension fraud. A national check followed and found 234,354 people aged 100 or older still listed as alive on Japan’s family registers whose whereabouts were unknown, about 77,000 of them aged 120 or older and 884 aged 150 or older.

In 2019 the demographer Saul Justin Newman went through the world’s records of people said to be 110 and over. In the US, those records fell by 69 to 82 percent after each state brought in birth certificates. Only about a fifth of the most thoroughly checked supercentenarians had a birth certificate, and none in the US. Recorded birthdays bunched on days divisible by five, which is what happens when people guess. The famous long-lived regions of Sardinia, Okinawa and Ikaria turned out to have low incomes, low literacy, high crime and short life expectancy compared with the rest of their countries. In Okinawa, about 90% of family records were destroyed in the Second World War and rebuilt afterwards, partly from memory.

Newman won the 2024 Ig Nobel Prize in Demography for this work. His paper is still a preprint that hasn’t been through peer review, and the demographers who mapped the blue zones dispute it. Are blue zones real?

What holds up?

The habits do, in studies with real records. California Seventh-day Adventists, the US group often counted as a blue zone, could expect at 30 to live 7.28 years longer than other white Californians if men and 4.42 years if women. Within the Adventists, diet, exercise, weight, past smoking and hormone therapy accounted for differences of up to 10 years. In the Harvard study of 123,219 US health professionals, five habits at 50 meant 12 to 14 more years. Those are the same habits, measured in people whose birthdays are on file.

Your turn

Look up the odds at your own age, or see your own estimate with the healthy years inside it.