Longevity: Want to Live Forever?

I am very active in my LINKEDIN account. I just published my latest medical article there and want to share it here:

Cyclist Frenchman Robert Marchand set a new world record when he cycled 22.547 kilometers (about 14 miles) in an hour — at the age of 105. «I am not here to be champion. I am here to prove that at 105 years old you can still ride a bike,» Marchand said.

Longevity is associated to genetic factors, but a healthy attitude and lifestyle contribute greatly to your lifespan.

«The most difficult problem is to get enough old people, especially those aged 100 or more, to take part in such a study. Interestingly, the genetic effects are much more evident in 100-year-olds than in 95-year-olds», notes the first author of the report, Dr. Friederike Flachsbart of the Institute of Clinical Molecular Biology at Kiel University.
A research group in the Faculty of Medicine at the Christian-Albrechts-University in Kiel (CAU) has now confirmed this assumption by comparing DNA samples taken from 388 German centenarians with those from 731 younger people.

Previously, in September 2008, an American research team led by Bradley J. Willcox had published in PNAS a study that indicated a higher frequency of this genetic variation in long-lived Americans of Japanese origin (ages 95 and above). Professor Almut Nebel, the scientific leader of the «Research Group for Healthy Ageing» at Kiel, comments:

«That published result is only of scientific value if it can be confirmed in a study with an independently chosen sample population. Without that there must still remain a tinge of doubt. We have now eliminated that uncertainty about the connection between FOXO3A and longevity, both by our results from the German sample study and by the support from our French partners in Paris, whose research on French centenarians showed the same trend. This discovery is of particular importance as there are genetic differences between Japanese and European people. We can now conclude that this gene is probably important as a factor in longevity throughout the world.»