How Long Older Adults Will Live Comes Down to 17 Often Surprising Factors - Neuroscience News

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A new model to predict the life expectancy of older people relies less on their specific disease diagnoses and more on factors such as the ability to grocery shop, the amount of certain small cholesterol particles circulating in their blood, and whether they never or only occasionally smoked.

“This study was designed to determine the proximal causes of longevity—the factors that portend whether someone is likely to live two more years or 10 more years,” said Virginia Byers Kraus, M.D., Ph.D., professor in the departments of Medicine, Pathology and Orthopedic Surgery at Duke University School of Medicine and lead author of the study appearing online in the journal eBioMedicine.

Kraus and colleagues launched their inquiry at an opportune time, having been directed to a cache of 1,500 blood samples from a 1980s longitudinal study that enrolled older people.

Capitalizing on all the features of the older study, the researchers were able to apply current sophisticated analytical tools.

The analysis found that a leading factor associated with longevity across each of the study’s benchmarks—two-, five- and 10-years after participants had their blood drawn—was physical function, which was defined as an ability to go grocery shopping or perform housecleaning chores.

For older people living two years beyond the time their blood had been drawn, the leading factor associated with longevity was having an abundance of high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol—and not just any HDL lipids, but high volumes of very small HDL particles.

“We hypothesize that these very small HDL particles are the size that is best at scavenging and clearing endotoxin, a potent inflammation-causing molecule from gut microbes, from the circulation [VBKMP1].

“Causal analysis identifies small HDL particles and physical activity as key determinants of longevity of older adults” by Virginia Byers Kraus et al.

Causal analysis identifies small HDL particles and physical activity as key determinants of longevity of older adults.

Numbers of small high-density lipoprotein particles, younger age, and fewer pack years of cigarette smoking were the strongest determinants of longevity at 2-, 5- and 10-years, respectively