From the NationalPost.com

Known as Wall Street’s oldest stockbroker, Irving Kahn died this year at the age of 109. He was born in 1905, made his first trade in 1929 before the Great Depression hit and continued to work for years after celebrating his 100th birthday. Remarkably, Kahn and his three siblings all reached the centenarian mark (age 100) while remaining relatively alert, active and healthy.

But as incredibly age-defying as they were, none of the Kahn siblings reached supercentenarian status — 110 years and older — in what appears to be a much harder feat for the human body to accomplish. While the Census Bureau reported about 50,000 centenarians living in the United States in 2010, there are only 50 to 80 supercentenarians in the entire world.

Genes or luck?

So what does it take to live to 110 and beyond? Is it a unique genetic profile, healthy habits or simply the luck of the draw? The answer is far from simple, and probably entails all of the above to some extent. But one thing researchers agree upon: Supercentenarians aren’t your average human beings.

The vast majority of us have a set of genes that will allow us to reach our late 80s and early 90s. Whether your death comes sooner or later than the next person is largely dictated by your lifestyle and environment, with harmful things such as smoking and drinking essentially fighting against your genes to lower your life span.

On the other hand, adding more-positive behaviors (e.g., exercise, diet, stress management) might tack on a few years — but it won’t make you a supercentenarian.

“Healthy living, diet, exercise — that sort of stuff will benefit you, and you might lead a life longer by maybe five years,” said geneticist Stuart Kim of the Stanford School of Medicine. “But to live 30 years longer, you probably need a different genetic background.”

Reports of the world’s longest-living person, 122-year-old Jeanne Calment, all say she frequently enjoyed cigarettes and port wine. Irving Kahn’s older sister — Helen Reicher, who died just shy of her 110th birthday — smoked daily for more than 80 years. As much as we’d like to think that might give us a free pass to indulge, such stories just reinforce the theory that supercentenarians probably possess a special resistance to disease written into their genomes.

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